WHATS POPPIN'
October 28, 2021
Everyone says beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but what exactly is beauty? Depending on what generation you grew up in, your idea of what beauty means will vary.
Social media and society will make you feel as if you’re either too big and not skinny enough, or too skinny and not thick enough. No matter what size you are, society will always make it as if you are not enough. There’s always been a fluctuation between skinny body types and bigger ones.
Since the 1920s, boyish figures of the flapper era were the standard. Then in the 1950s, we had Hollywood starlets such as Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor. They were the idealized body to have with their curvy hourglass figure, larger breasts, and slim waists. Skipping ahead to the 90s we had the straight and tall supermodel proportions of celebs like Kate Moss and Naomi Cambell.
The early 2000s were also very keen on wanting girls with very thin figures, but now it seems that the new ideal body that social media is trying to push onto women today is the ‘slim thick body glass’ figure. In America today, the ideal beauty standard is mostly represented by the Kardashians. A severe hourglass body shape and a face represented by a mix of ethnic ambiguous features, but still visibly white.
Scrolling through Instagram, watching music videos or movies, and seeing people with these body types can often make you want to achieve getting that exact body. This past year the rise of getting BBLs(Brazilian Butt Lifts) has been increasing day by day. Also, a lot of celebrities have this surgery as well but will act as if it never happened, creating this false narrative that having a flat stomach, big butt, and wide hips is attainable to everyone. They usually attribute their working out and a healthy diet to their ideal body instead of also crediting the surgeon who molded their new body by hand.
According to The New Yorker magazine, “Ideals of female beauty that can only be met through painful processes of physical manipulation have always been with us, from tiny feet in imperial China to wasp waists in nineteenth-century Europe. But contemporary systems of continual visual self-broadcasting—reality TV, social media—have created new disciplines of continual visual self-improvement.”
Although beauty is in the eyes of the beholder, society will dictate whether or not your body or face is trendy or not. They will make women feel as if they are never good enough, leading them into wanting to get plastic surgery and work done on their bodies in order to satisfy society’s ideal beauty standard.
