Western Beauty Standards and their Impact on Young Women

I seeked to find answers to the questions “What are beauty standards for women in the west today?”, “What is their history?”, “What is their impact on young women?” and “What are different experiences of white women vs. women of color and cis women vs. trans women?”. For this purpose, I researched in books and online. Further, I organised an afternoon of conversations on the above-mentioned questions. Omnipresent beauty standards are Slim Thickness for body shapes and The Instagram Face for faces. These standards can be found in present icons of beauty. Simultaneously, there are detailed hierarchies of beauty resulting in problematic mechanisms like thin privilege. On a larger scale of time, it has to be noted that present beauty standards are just coincidental snapshots in an ongoing evolution. They are founded upon colonialism, white supremacy, patriarchy and eugenics. These ideologies have linked beauty with health, success and trustworthiness. All women I interviewed share quite an amount of experiences. They all name the same expectations that pressure them. Often, their self-perception has been formed by single events in their early youth. This leads to another similarity: Nearly all interviewees described a process of having gained self-confidence and freedom in their beauty expressions as young adults. However, women form a broad spectrum of experiences and identities. While white women are privileged in this field, women of color experience racism and racist ideas of beauty on a daily basis. In the same manner, trans women have struggles and perspectives that would never occur to cis women.