The concept of beauty has been debated by numerous philosophers and artists, but it is most commonly associated with a pleasing physical appearance, especially in women. Beauty and race intersect both in individual psyches and in society. Women of all races continue to compare themselves to an unattainable ideal.
Defining Beauty: A Gendered and Racialized Concept
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines beauty as a quality that is especially feminine. The perception of physical attractiveness includes facial features, skin color, and body. It can be argued that the OED implicitly recognizes that “beauty” is a gendered, racialized word. Research suggests that at least by the age of three months, babies demonstrate preferences based on attractive facial features, gender, and race, and by the age of three or four, children show observable biases based on these factors.
From an early age, girls describe people in terms of appearance more frequently than do boys. Through such channels as peer and family interactions, television programming and commercials, and fairy tales, children receive cultural reinforcement concerning the value attached particularly to attractiveness in females.
Frevert (2014) notes that research supports the idea of a cross-cultural image of beauty that includes big eyes, pronounced cheekbones, and a wide smile. Observation of the media that define beauty in contemporary culture reveals that the predominant image of beauty in European and American culture has been white. The idea that Eurocentric features and light skin are necessary for beauty is rooted in slavery and colonialism, and airbrushed images that celebrate beauty in this mythologized form are ubiquitous in twenty-first century American culture. Thinness too is part of the beauty image.
The Impact of Colonialism and Eurocentric Standards
Starting around the 15th century, “colonizers went to Africa, Asia, and Latin America and introduced the idea that whiteness is good, that nothing is better than white,” Adawe says. “If you were white, you had better economic well-being, you had good employment and education attainment.” Skin tone has long had class connotations.
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In early Egyptian, Greek, and Roman societies, lighter skin was associated with belonging to a higher class, because “a woman with fair skin clearly led a very different life to that of the bronzed laborer,” Tungate writes - but colonialism took this concept and applied it across races. “It was the same ideology during slavery in the United States,” Adawe says. “Those with darker skin were working in the field outside. Those with lighter skin were favored, they worked in the homes. The colonizers left, but they left a legacy: the legacy of whiteness. It’s an ongoing colonization of the mindset.”
Western nations who have largely adopted European standards of beauty in women have been dominant and continue to be so even in what some have labeled a post-racist society. The result has been internalized racism that has often created dissatisfaction and shame in non-white groups.
The colonizer mindset persists today. It’s reflected on the faces in the pages of fashion magazines, which, up until recently, were almost exclusively white. It’s there in every foundation range that features 10 choices for white women but only two for Black women; a still-too-common occurrence, despite the industry’s newfound focus on more inclusive shade selections. It’s built into the cosmetics corporations that continue to sell skin lightening creams in Asia - albeit, skin lightening creams that, in response to recent backlash, now have less overtly racist product names.
Global news wrote about the difficulty people with dark skin have when trying to find makeup shades in broader ranges, citing a 2018 poll conducted by Makeup for Melanin Girls (MFMG) where 80% of 5,500 women said is challenging to find a foundation for their skin tone. Even with big makeup brands today pushing for more inclusivity and a better span of options there is still so much to be done.
In this way, colonialism gave capitalism a brilliant business model to follow: It illustrated just how easy it is to profit off of deep-seated insecurities stemming from a lifetime of being treated as less than. And so throughout history capitalism has sowed the seeds of insecurity in all of us.
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Girls Ages 6-18 Talk About Body Image | Allure
The Pervasiveness of Body Image Dissatisfaction
Countless studies show that body image dissatisfaction is linked to self-esteem and its lack. Some research suggests that African American women typically have more positive body images than do Caucasian and Hispanic women, but “colorism,” the idea that lighter skin color is more aesthetically pleasing, is also part of body image. Research suggests that its effects on self-esteem can be strong for some African American women. Skin color defines beauty in cultures other than African American.
Women of all races are affected by this narrow, Westernized definition of beauty. According to Beauty at Any Cost: A YWCA Report on the Consequences of America’s Beauty Obsession on Women and Girls, released in 2008, 80 percent of American women were dissatisfied with their appearance. The same report revealed that women spent $7 billion on cosmetics in 2007 and another $11.7 million on cosmetic surgeries (chiefly breast augmentation and liposuction) and nonsurgical procedures (such as Botox injections). More than 90 percent of surgical procedures were performed on women; African American, Hispanic American, and Asian American women accounted for almost one-fourth of the procedures.
Beauty at Any Cost reports that about 10 million women suffered from an eating disorder, and 67 percent of the rest were dieting, including 53 percent already at a healthy weight. Eating disorders are often assumed to be a problem only for white, upper middle-class women and girls, but research indicates that eating disorders also affect African Americans, Latinas, Asians, and Native Americans. Adolescents are particularly vulnerable. Researchers note that as youth adopt Western perceptions of beauty, their attachment to their ethnic identity diminishes, and their desire for the unrealistic slenderness that is part of the American ideal places adolescents of color at higher risk for eating disorders.
According to the Dove Global Beauty and Confidence Report (2016), which surveyed women in thirteen countries, 69 percent of women and 65 percent of girls blame the unrealistic concept of beauty disseminated by advertising and media for their appearance anxiety, and even higher percentages (71 percent and 67 percent) call for media images that present greater diversity in physical appearance, age, race, shape, and size. models were white. The idea of beauty reflected in images of white women is not limited to the United States. For example, models who appear in advertisements in countries such as Singapore and Taiwan were also predominantly white.
Challenging Eurocentric Beauty Ideals
Miss Jamaica Davina Bennett rejected Eurocentric beauty ideals when she sported her afro at this year’s Miss Universe Pageant. Bennett had long crowned herself with her afro style and insisted on wearing her natural hair to challenge beauty stereotypes. The Miss Universe pageant offered a platform to confront beauty ideals and radiate self-love and acceptance for Black girls and women.
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The ongoing assault on Black hair, in which Black girls are removed from school for wearing braids, for example, makes Bennett’s Afro style a potent and timely challenge to the universalizing of Eurocentric features as standard. Bennett’s style choice also has an affirming power.
A new study sheds light on racialized beauty norms that motivate the use of chemical hair straighteners and skin lighteners linked to poor health outcomes. Among survey respondents, beauty was the leading reason for using both chemical straighteners and skin lighteners. Historically, chemical straighteners and skin lighteners are disproportionately used by women of color, as a result of racialized beauty norms that prioritize straight hair and light skin.
Chemical straighteners, such as relaxers, can contain harmful chemicals such as phthalates, parabens, and formaldehyde. Studies have linked relaxer use with earlier age at menarche and increased risk of uterine fibroids and breast and uterine cancers.
While the evidence suggests a decline in the use of chemical straighteners by Black women as women opt for hairstyles that feature their natural hair texture, the researchers caution that there is a lack of data on the chemical content of hair products sold to style natural hairstyles.
Efforts Towards Diversity and Inclusion
Ironically, perhaps nothing affirms the dominance of whiteness and thinness as the accepted standards for ideal beauty more than the attention directed at efforts to define beauty more diversely. Two of the best-known examples of media diversity strategies that attracted extensive media attention are Dove’s long-running Real Beauty campaign and Vogue magazine’s black issue.
In 2004, Edelman, public relations firm for Dove, conducted a marketing research study that found only 2 percent of women in their global sample thought of themselves as beautiful. The result was Dove’s Real Beauty campaign. Race was only one part of diversity in the Dove campaign. Ad Age chose the Campaign for Real Beauty as the top advertising campaign of the twenty-first century, deeming it the most unforgettable and groundbreaking and crediting it with attempting to change society’s ideas about beauty.
High fashion is a frequent target of criticism for purveying unattainable and unhealthy body images and perpetuating racial and ethnic stereotypes. As the global trendsetter in the field, Vogue has established the standard for models’ looks (Kuipers, Chow & van der Laan, 2014). In July 2008, Vogue Italia published an all black issue. Four covers featured English models Naomi Campbell and Jourdan Dunn, American Sessilee Lopez, and Ethiopian-born Liya Kebede.
The Dove campaign and Vogue’s black issue undoubtedly led some to question the prevailing, narrow, racialized definition of beauty. The lasting effects of the two efforts, however, are open to question.
Online fashion industry forum The Fashion Spot noted in their October 2016 Diversity Report that of the models walking in fashion weeks in New York, London, Milan, and Paris, 25.4 percent were women of color: 10.33 percent black, 7 percent Asian, 3.36 percent Latina, .4 percent Middle Eastern, and 4.27 percent defined as “other.”
