Physical insecurity is often framed as a personal issue that needs to be individually resolved through self-confidence, discipline, and love. While it may be true, this framing ignores the reality that physical insecurity is often founded in social beauty standards that women are expected to live up to. These standards are not only unrealistic, but they are also unequally enforced, placing far greater pressure on women than on men. This raises a question: why would society promote ideals that are impossible to live up to and that encourage women to criticize their own appearance? The answer lies in power and profit. These standards benefit corporate industries while simultaneously allowing men to maintain control over women’s social and professional power. By framing insecurity as a personal failing, women are made to feel responsible for “fixing” themselves, often through consumption, and in turn benefiting cosmetic industries and reinforcing gender power dynamics.Â
Beauty, skincare, fitness, wellness, and related industries depend on women’s dissatisfaction with themselves to thrive. These industries profit from convincing women that something about their appearance is lacking and that this lack can be remedied through products, treatments, or procedures. Women’s confidence, happiness, and success are often promised through this consumption and the attainment of certain features. Beauty standards may have changed over time, but they have always maintained unattainable ideals. For example, women are expected to have flawless and youthful-looking skin even in older age, an expectation that fuels the success of skincare companies and cosmetic medical industries. Women are pressured to have no fat in certain areas of their bodies and more curves in others. To encourage this, advertisements promote weight loss, anti-aging creams, cosmetic procedures, and more, amplifying these standards and further capitalizing on women’s physical insecurities. Â
Beauty standards function not only as aesthetic expectations but as tools of social control that reinforce patriarchal power. From a young age, women are taught — sometimes explicitly and other times implicitly — that their value is rooted in their appearance and their importance in the workplace depends on this outside beauty. From then on, their time, energy, and self-worth become consumed by over-analyzing their every move and internalizing their flaws. This constant pressure limits women’s autonomy, making it more difficult to assert authority or take on positions of power without needing to tiptoe around male coworkers, for whom the work structure is shaped. Men, on the other hand, are largely exempt from the same level of scrutiny that women are victims of, allowing them to navigate the corporate world without needing to prove their worth through physical perfection. By keeping women preoccupied with the way they look, through criticism or sexualization, society restricts their power, ensuring that beauty remains not a personal choice or channel for self-expression, but a social obligation with unequal consequences. This structural issue makes the workplace inherently unfair no matter how hard women work, and regardless of their qualifications for a job compared to her male competitors.Â
Understanding beauty standards as socially constructed rather than individually chosen allows us to see the reality behind physical insecurity. But being aware of this is the beginning of women taking their power back. When women recognize that these pressures were never personal failures and were always ingrained in the foundation of society, they gain the freedom to reclaim their energy and confidence. This should motivate us to ask ourselves who we are and who we want to be, and to be the change we hope to see in our social and professional world. By asking these questions, we can also begin to redefine what beauty means to us and find ourselves in the process, because, in the end, being ourselves is the most powerful thing we can be.Â