Beauty Beyond Beauty Standards

Every day, it seems to feel like the expectations for women are only getting higher and more extreme with each new way women are suddenly seen as beautiful. Trends dictate what kinds of pretty there are, and women are expected to fit into those categories as if they decide how much she’s valued. Thinness has suddenly been thrown into everyone’s conversations, once again putting women’s bodies up for the public’s discussion. 

And I agree, women in the public eye are significantly smaller than they’ve been in a bit, and it is an issue for the young girls who watch this happen. 

But are we doing more harm by highlighting this and spending time dissecting how parts of their bodies look at every award show they attend? It feels like we’ve done that before, with every woman and every era of beauty we seem to be in. 

Societal Expectations

Society is known to criticize women for almost everything, like how they react to what size they should be. Only to tear them down more when they finally decide to try to change it. There are standards set up for what makes women beautiful, and instead of trying to tear those down, it seems like society only moves backwards, as they just end up tearing down the woman instead. It feels as if they criticize and shame the women who are now deemed as not fitting this “beauty standard”, and we watch as they change that part of themselves, only to shame them even more when it’s done. Never once addressing the real root of the problem, which to me seems to be having these standards in the first place. 

While thinking about writing this, I kept trying to find physical traits that made people beautiful in the first place, and I kept finding myself stuck. Not because there were too few, but instead, I kept finding too many. Truthfully, I don’t think beauty can ever be defined, and it’s certainly not coming from their clothes or what size they are. I don’t think my friends are beautiful just because of what they look like, and I am not their friend simply because they are. 

It’s because of the people they are and the thoughtful ways in which they treat others that make them so special to me. 

Moral of the Story

To me, though, this applies to everyone, and it makes me so upset every time we become conditioned to believe otherwise. To even think beauty can be standardized in the first place feels wrong. There’s so much beauty in everything, in every variation of every person, so much so that there can’t possibly be only one thing that defines beauty. But also, there’s so much more that makes someone beautiful, more than what their nose or waist looks like at any given moment. 

There is a bigger issue at hand that trying to solve would be infinitely better than the way we tear women down for simply existing. It’s a cycle that keeps reimagining itself, this never-ending trend of hating on women for different ways that they choose to live harmlessly. The way we look should never be a trend, and we can feed into that in so many different ways, even when we think we might not be.

I think a certain level of concern is important, and one that I agree with and find myself equally feeling. I also think it’s something worth exploring deeper, to try and find the root of the problem instead of just the way it presents itself. 

Beauty is beyond any level that society tries to set it at for the year, and it will never be merely a physical thing.

• beauty
• mental health
• society