History of the Always Changing Female Beauty Standards

Humans have always tried to prescribe how the perfect female body ought to look like. Simultaneously, they have also been unable to stick to any specific beauty ideal for a prolonged period of time. Beauty ideals have changed significantly throughout the ages. Nonetheless, society has always tried to enforce whichever fad was prevalent at some time period, and whoever deviated from some beauty standard got labeled as ugly. In this article, I will provide a short history of female beauty ideals throughout the ages. As you will quickly notice, what we consider a perfect female body in 21^st century differs from what people considered beautiful in various other time periods and cultures. Once you realize the fleeting nature of beauty standards, you are forced to consider them in a new light and examine their tenability. Are we really justified in our clinging to some beauty standard and striving to change our bodies just to conform to the ideal? Or maybe we should rethink our obsession with the prevailing fads?

As an artist, I find human perception of beauty fascinating. Why do humans perceive certain shapes and color combinations as beautiful? Why do we enjoy looking at some buildings or landscapes? Or why the sky is perceived as beautiful during the sunset? When it comes to man-made objects, usually there’s little harm in humans perceiving one alternative as more beautiful than the other one. Do majority of humans think that a home surrounded by flowers is prettier than a plain one? If so, then let’s just plant some flowers. There’s no harm done in choosing the more beautiful alternative when it comes to man-made things like architecture. Unfortunately, it’s an entirely different matter when it comes to human bodies. People categorize their bodies as ether “beautiful” or “ugly” based on arbitrary criteria, which lack any consistency. Once some person gets labeled as ugly, they experience severe drawbacks and social repercussions.

Nowadays, popular culture has created a very specific image of how a beautiful woman ought to look like. A woman must be very thin with hardly any fat on her body. Simultaneously, she also needs large breasts. Those with naturally pale skin must be suntanned. Let’s see how this image compares to what people perceived as beautiful in other time periods. I will start with a very simple question: how much adipose tissue (a.k.a. body fat) should a woman have? In 21^st century modeling agencies and fashion magazines might be insisting that skinny women are the prettiest, but people didn’t always agree with this opinion.

Venus de Milo, created sometime between 130 and 100 BC, is believed to depict Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love and beauty; however, some scholars claim it is the sea-goddess Amphitrite. If you pay attention to her body shape, you’ll notice that she is far from skinny. Moreover, her breasts are pretty small by modern beauty standards. If a woman who looked exactly like this wanted to become a model in 21^st century, she would be told to lose some weight (and maybe to also get breast implants).

In Greek mythology, Charites or Graces were the daughters of Zeus. They were minor goddesses who represented youth, beauty, mirth, and elegance. Are you starting to notice a pattern here? In past, artists preferred to depict goddesses with more body fat than what humans proclaim as ideal nowadays.

Here’s one more painting, because I just love Bouguereau’s works. Pay attention to the visible body fat on her stomach. Moreover, her skin is quite pale, she clearly isn’t suntanned.

Here are some photos of what people considered sexy back in the 1890s. Burlesque was popular in London from the 1830s to the 1890s. Burlesque shows were introduced to the U.S. in the 1840s. Often dancers wore what was considered revealing costumes at the time, thus these shows were perceived as scandalous. Their form-fitting clothes showed off the shapes of their legs and thighs. Their corsets accentuated their bosoms. The appearance of these women was intentionally eroticized. And men adored them. Unlike many of the slender sex figures of the modern day, burlesque women were expected not to be skinny. Instead, curves were viewed as an asset.

For a somewhat different look, here’s an image from 1920s. Called garçonne in French (“boy” with a feminine suffix), flapper fashion style made women look young and boyish: short hair, flattened breasts, and straight waists accentuated their appearance.

As it happens with fashion and beauty standards, nothing lasts for long. After some years, flapper fashion went out of style and was replaced with a more curvy ideal body shape.

Here is a selection of several vintage weight gain advertisements. Up until somewhat recently, “skinny” used be considered synonymous with “ugly.” Thin women were encouraged to gain some weight and get those feminine curves. How were they supposed to do that? By buying various products that promised to help them gain weight. Pay attention to the message in these weight gain advertisements: “A certain type of body is ugly, so you must spend money and buy our product in order to fix yourself.”

You can click on an image to see it enlarged.

It was only in 1970s that skinny women became the beautiful ones. This trend started with Twiggy (full name: Dame Lesley Lawson). Twiggy was an English model, actress, and singer. By 1967, she had modeled in France, Japan, and the US, and had landed on the covers of Vogue and The Tatler. Her fame had spread worldwide. Women wanted to look like her, they started dieting.

As you must have noticed by now, throughout history humans haven’t been able to reach a consensus about how much body fat a beautiful woman ought to have. What about other aspects of one’s physical appearance. Has there been a consensus about those? Of course, not. Let’s discuss skin tones next. How much melanin should a woman have in her skin?

Historically, European aristocrats preferred pale skin. Obviously, a noble woman avoided sun rays like plague. But that wasn’t sufficient. Venetian ceruse was a 16^th century cosmetic used as a skin whitener. It was a mixture of water, vinegar, and lead. The cosmetic’s use of white lead as a pigment caused lead poisoning, damaging the skin and causing hair loss. The more paint you wore, the more you needed to wear next time to cover your damaged skin. Usage over an extended period could cause death. Being pale was serious business for royal women.

If you thought that putting lead on your face was a bad idea, rest assured, aristocrats’ obsession with pale skin only got even worse. Victorian beauty ideals were obsessed with pallor: upper class white women chased even whiter skin, a symbol that their privilege never left them working in the sun. They wanted to make their skin even more translucent. There were women who didn’t want to depend upon make-up, instead they wanted to have naturally light skin. In order to look “naturally” pale, women ingested arsenic. It destroys red blood cells, which leads to pale skin, and eventually, death.

In was only in 20^th century that sun tanned skin became popular. Of course, once people decided that they wanted darker skin, they invented tanning booths, and various sunless tanning products that are available in the form of darkening creams, gels, lotions, and sprays that are self-applied on the skin.

So far I only talked about skin tones and weight. There are also other topics I could discuss. For example, I could mention how in China people used to believe that the natural shape of female feet isn’t beautiful enough. Thus, enter food binding, the custom of applying tight binding to the feet of young girls to modify the shape and size of their feet. Bound feet were a mark of beauty and also a prerequisite for finding a good husband, the ideal length, called the “Golden Lotus,” being about 10 cm.

Alternatively, I could mention eye drops prepared from the belladonna plant that were used to dilate women’s pupils, an effect considered to be attractive and seductive. Belladonna drops acted as a muscarinic antagonist, blocking receptors in the muscles of the eye that constrict pupil size. Never mind the adverse effects of causing minor visual distortions, inability to focus on near objects, or, if used for a prolonged period of time, blindness. People do odd things for the sake of beauty.

Once you learn a bit of art history and history in general, you realize that beauty standards are tricky at best. They are extremely inconsistent. I would call them arbitrary. Nowadays popular culture might have indoctrinated us with one specific image (very thin, big breasts, suntanned skin), but this one image isn’t in any way more valid than all the historical alternatives. I believe that attempting to define certain body shapes as either beautiful or ugly is futile. Whichever one perfect image people may pick, it can easily switch back and forth several times during just one century. Yet people still buy into the newest trend.

Is there anything consistent when it comes to beauty standards? Actually, yes. Beauty is closely related to sexual attraction and mate selection. There is an evolutionary advantage to perceiving as visually attractive various traits, which indicate that some person is suitable for baby-making. Young people are seen as more beautiful than elderly people. We also tend to perceive symmetrical faces as beautiful. This is because it is seen as an indicator of health and genetic fitness.

People also perceive average faces as beautiful (in this context, “average” means “the mathematical mean”). For example, a very large or a very small nose is perceived as odd, but a nose of an average shape and size will be perceived as more beautiful. There have been averageness studies that have focused on photographic overlay of human faces, in which images are morphed together.

Most people will perceive this face as beautiful (I certainly do). Various studies have shown that average faces are consistently rated as more attractive than the faces used to generate them. This principle transcends culture. That the preference for the average is biological rather than cultural has been supported by various studies with isolated hunter-gatherer tribes or babies all of whom judged computer-generated average images as more attractive that actual human faces. A possible evolutionary explanation for averageness is koinophilia—sexually-reproducing animals seek mates with primarily average features, because extreme and uncommon features are likely to indicate disadvantageous mutations.

So far we have concluded that some beauty criteria are culture specific (for example, various cultures have different opinions about how light or dark the perfect skin tone ought to be), while other beauty criteria are biologically hardwired into our brains and remain the same in every culture (for example, symmetrical faces are seen as more beautiful than asymmetrical ones).

There’s not much we can do about our biology, which is why next I’m going to discuss culture-specific beauty standards. Their arbitrary nature, lack of consistency, and variance among cultures is exactly what makes culture-specific beauty standards so fascinating for me. How do people learn to perceive some physical trait as beautiful? And who exactly sets the beauty standard and determines which traits are going to be perceived as beautiful in some society?

The first question is simple to answer: exposure determines what we will learn to like. Humans like whatever they are familiar with. Popular culture creates a narrative about what is beautiful—fashion magazines, movies, advertisements, etc. display similar images of women who all look pretty much the same. If people are routinely shown one and the same image and repeatedly told that this is how beauty looks like, we get used to the message and we learn to accept it.

The second question is trickier: do fashion magazines and movies showcase models whose physical appearance corresponds to what people already like or do people learn to like whatever the magazine editors and movie directors have choosen to show to us? And what about all the shifts in people’s preferences? Who initiates those? For example, when Europeans and Americans switched from liking pale skin to liking suntanned skin, why exactly did that happen and who caused it?

Let’s consider sun tanning. In the 1920s, fashion-designer Coco Chanel accidentally got suntanned while visiting the French Riviera. When she arrived home, her fans liked the look and started to adopt darker skin tones themselves. Tanned skin became a trend partly because of Coco’s status and the longing for her lifestyle by other members of society. Celebrities influence what people will end up liking, but there’s more to it. Social class is what really matters here. Prior to the 20^th century, pale skin signaled that you were likely to have plenty of money since it was only the upper class that enjoyed a life of leisure indoors. Things changed in the 20^th century. Most of the poor people no longer worked as peasants in the fields, instead they worked indoors. For poor people being suntanned became aspirational rather than achievable—holidays were rare, poor people had neither the free time nor the money to go on a Mediterranean cruise and get suntanned like Coco Chanel could. As people’s lifestyles changed, suntanned skin became the visual sign that somebody had plenty of free time and money. At least this is what happened for naturally light-skinned people of Caucasian descent. Nowadays, tanning is not a worldwide craze—in many parts of the globe, people attempt to lighten their skin because of the privileges and social status that come with being white. Regardless of whether a woman is being told to make her skin darker or lighter, ultimately it is all about social status and signaling that you belong to the upper class.

The trend remains the same also for other beauty norms. Foot binding crippled Chinese women, severely impairing their ability to walk or work. Only upper class people could afford the sedentary lifestyle that was necessary in order to accommodate a woman’s limited mobility. Thus small feet became a status symbol. Thus people started perceiving them as beautiful.

Being skinny has also turned into a quasi status symbol. In the old days, food was scarce. It was considered beautiful to be plump, because weight was associated with wealth and leisure. The skinnier the person, the less food they had. Thus, you didn’t want to be them. Nowadays, things are different for people living in the fast food nation. Being thin means that you are wealthy enough to be able to afford healthy, good quality food. It also indicates that you have the free time necessary for staying fit and exercising. Of course, once people decided that being thin equals with being beautiful, it turned into a race to the bottom—people had to become thinner and thinner in order to become more and more beautiful. And here we are now, dealing with anorexia and women literally starving themselves to death in order to achieve the beauty ideal.

So here we have it: wealthy celebrities and members of the upper class start doing something, afterwards poor people imitate them. A new trend is born. Yet it’s not always members of the upper class who initiate and uphold changes in beauty norms. Marketers and corporations selling beauty products also are capable of creating entirely new trends. Body hair, about which I have already written a while ago, and its removal exemplify this. In 1908 began a heavy and effective advertising campaign, which instructed American people that female underarm hair was offensive. Women began to shave their body hair thanks to three industries: male hair removal products industry, which had become recently commercially successful and sought to expand its market; the women’s clothing fashion industry, which began producing sheer and sleeveless evening gowns and rising hemlines; and the mass production of women’s magazines.

At the time, the practice of removing hair from the underarms and legs was practically unheard of. Hair removal was a novel concept. When it was first introduced, companies had to persuade women of the benefits of hair removal, and demonstrate how to practice it. Gillette and dozens of other hair removal companies used the changes in women’s clothing fashions as justification for the sudden need to remove underarm hair, and later leg hair. The message was distributed primarily and heavily through the newly-born, popular, and influential women’s magazines.

Proclaiming that our natural bodies are beautiful means no revenue for the corporations. If hairy legs are seen as beautiful, women buy fewer (if any) razors. If one’s natural skin tone is perceived as beautiful, there is no market for skin whitening or darkening products. Is your hair straight? Here’s a product that will make it curly. Is your hair curly? Here’s a product that will make it straight. Is your skin very light? Here’s a product that will make it darker? Are you African American? Here’s a product that will make your skin lighter. Are you skinny? Here’s a product that will make you gain weight. Are you curvy? Here’s a product that will make you lose weight. Corporations want us to be unhappy with the natural appearance of our bodies, because this is how they can make a profit.

If women’s magazines said “you are already beautiful,” women wouldn’t buy a new issue every week. If women’s magazines say “you aren’t beautiful enough yet, but we can teach you how to make your body beautiful,” then women will buy a new issue every week in order to learn the latest beauty tips on how to change the natural appearance of their bodies.

The end result is that people have unreasonable expectations. Photos of fashion models are photoshopped, they advertise a look that’s literally impossible in real life. There’s also an emphasis on unnatural traits. Some physical trait gets labeled as beautiful. For example, it gets proclaimed that “pale skin is beautiful.” Then a race to the bottom starts. If light skin is beautiful, then even lighter skin must be even more beautiful. Then let’s make the skin even lighter. Small feet are beautiful. Then let’s make them smaller. The end result is that “beautiful” equates to “anatomically impossible.” Our natural bodies get proclaimed as ugly, and, unless we ingest arsenic or artificially halt normal feet development in young girls, then the resulting physical appearance won’t be beautiful. We harm our bodies, we endure pain for the sake of reaching some unnatural and artificially created beauty standard. Sometimes we even kill ourselves. And here we are, enduring all this suffering for the sake of some artificially created, arbitrary beauty standard, which isn’t even consistent across longer time periods, and which won’t even survive for more than just a few decades.

You might think that current beauty standards are better, because those don’t require ingesting arsenic or binding feet. Yet they are still bad enough to be harmful. Breast implants, high heel shoes, skin whitening or darkening procedures, weight loss pills and dieting regimes, all those things harm our bodies.

Here’s the problem with social pressure—it limits what our supposedly “free” choices are. Yes, women might be “freely” choosing to lose weight, wear high heels, or get breast implants, but there’s a problem with this line of reasoning. Here are two messages that the society proliferates: (1) a woman’s value as a human being depends on her having a beautiful body; (2) skinny body, high heels, and breast implants are beautiful. Saying that modern women want to starve themselves, wear heels, and enlarge their breasts is akin to saying that Chinese women wanted to bind their feet. The problem is that their choices are limited by the society, thus they are motivated to choose to harm themselves and endure pain.

I won’t say that women shouldn’t wear heels or use certain cosmetic products; after all, it still is everybody’s free choice to decide what they want to do with their body. But I do wish we lived in a society that didn’t pressure people to harm their own bodies and waste time and money in order to “become beautiful,” because our natural bodies aren’t perceived as beautiful enough.

To conclude, beauty is only skin deep, and on top of that, it’s also arbitrary. Beauty standards cannot even survive the test of time. Even within a single society people often cannot agree upon what is or isn’t beautiful. For example, some people perceive breast implants as beautiful. Others perceive them as ugly and disfiguring (personally, I strongly dislike the look of breast implants). Some people think skinny women are beautiful; others prefer the look of plus size models. Ultimately, people are obsessing over what is just face-meat. A certain shape of face-meat is beautiful and gives you a higher status in society. Somewhat differently shaped face-meat, on the other hand, reduces your income and makes you hate your own body.