Shedding a Light on Social Media’s Spread of Unrealistic Beauty Standards
Every morning, we start our day by looking in the mirror. As a woman who cares about the way I present myself and how others perceive me, I find myself fixated on the way I look, whether it’s dressing a certain way or straightening my hair to look more presentable. In fact, I bet most women are guilty of filling their day with glances in the mirror critiquing whether the new dress they bought complements their bodies correctly, or whipping out the camera in their phones to check if the makeup is still covering the pesky pimple that made a surprise emergence the night before.
In the society we live in today, men and women are held to certain standards of beauty that, when followed, allow them to be considered attractive. Women specifically are held to high standards when it comes to the physical features and beauty characteristics they are expected to have, which they are taught at a young age and continue to be exposed to throughout their lives. The ways women are exposed to beauty standards are ever increasing, the most influential being social and mainstream media, given the magnitude of the online world today. Social media apps are largely responsible for perpetuating unrealistic beauty and body standards, and can negatively impact the mental and physical well being of anyone. Written from the female perspective, this paper will focus on the impact on specifically adolescent girls and women.
First, let’s define platforms and mediums I consider social media and the main ones I’ll be addressing. When I say social media, I mean the obvious platforms like Instagram, Tiktok, Facebook, while also referring to less obvious platforms like Youtube, Pinterest, Snapchat. Additionally, considering that almost everything today has at least some online presence, I also consider magazines and advertisements, especially fashion and beauty related, part of the social media realm. It is also important to recognize the role celebrities and influencers have in perpetuating beauty ideals through their platforms online. Given the magnitude of the online world, I will only be mentioning beauty standards on Instagram, magazines, and advertisements.
Beauty standards have been around for thousands of years, probably long before history even started being recorded, and are constantly changing with the times, cultures, locations, and trends. Historically from a Western perspective, we can see all sorts of shifts in female beauty, from fair skinned to olive skinned, thin to plump to what we now call “slim thick” (Romm, 1987). There are also things that have remained rather constant, like the desire for fair eyes and blonde hair, as well as delicate features– god forbid a woman has strong masucline features (Romm, 1987). Also, even though beauty standards stem from a place of survival, like finding the proper mate to continue the species, they quickly transformed to “reflect the power structure in our society” (Romm, 1987). There’s no denying our society was created by and for men, but regardless of the power they have over countless societal issues, women also play a role in recognizing beauty standards set upon them and creating ways to follow them, even when the beauty ideals aren’t achievable naturally. This can be seen in mainstream and social media platforms, like magazine covers and Instagram.
Over the last few decades, access to the internet, mobile devices, and social media has skyrocketed. With five billion mobile device owners and more than four billion active social media users in 2021, a large portion of people’s lives are dedicated to their online presence (L. Darina, 2021). Reasons for joining social media have also shifted. Whereas platforms like Facebook and Instagram used to offer users ways to keep up with friends and family, they are now spaces where people follow popular celebrities and influencers, the newest fashion trends, and are unknowingly, or knowingly, exposed to beauty standards that they might feel the need to conform to.
Not only that, but as social media becomes more widespread, users are becoming exposed to beauty standards at younger and younger ages. This is a huge issue because young girls already face beauty and body insecurities just from being raised in a world where women consume media that tells them there needs to be a certain thinnest of their waist, bigness of their chest, lowness of their weight, and so much more. Growing up, I can remember multiple occasions where I didn’t feel as pretty as girls with blonde hair or the ones who were tall and skinny, and I think a large reason for that was the influence dolls like Barbies had over my developing thoughts. Since its invention in 1959, Barbie dolls have been continuing to set unrealistic body standards while ignoring the fact that “if Barbie were real… her body fat percentage would be so low that she would be unable to menstruate” (Vient, 2020). On the other side of the spectrum are Bratz dolls, which fit into many of today’s beauty standards with big lips, smoky-fox eyes, and cinched waists. Though Bratz have been called “anti-barbies”, they still “enforced yet another unattainable ideal of female beauty, made to fit with evolving standards of pop culture” (Vient, 2020).
Beauty standards and beauty trends women encounter online are countless, up to if not more than a hundred different ideals and features society and social media consider attractive. Women now are expected to have long legs and thick hips, but no hip dips; flat stomachs and big breasts, but no stretch marks; pouty lips and big eyes; soft skin and no body hair, with no blemishes allowed. Features floating through social media now include sloped up, delicate noses; fox, lifted eyes; pouty lips; faux-freckle, sun-kissed look; and so much more. Going on social media today, specifically Instagram, you would be bombarded with images that exemplify those same features of Barbie and Bratz dolls. Celebrities play a large role in pushing and maintaining beauty standards, as they are often the main exemplifiers of them (Calogero et al, 9, 2007). Scrolling through, you’re bound to see at least a picture or two of Kylie Jenner and her pouty lips or Kim Kardashian and her hourglass figure. There’s Bella Hadid’s bone structure and Zendaya’s perfectly symmetrical face. Don’t forget about Madison Beer’s sloped nose or Sydney Sweeney’s full sized chest.
All of these women are beautiful in their own right, but passing their appearances off as completely natural when they aren’t only widens the gap between what we think women should look like versus what they actually look like. When people compare themselves to idealized media images, in this case celebrities, upward comparison occurs, which leads to increased negative perceptions of their appearance (MacCallum, 2016, 239). In other words, self-confidence decreases and insecurities increase.o Upward comparisons often lead to the internalization of guilt, where people blame themselves for discrepancies in their appearance compared to curated media images. Think about this too: what happens in the hundreds of cases when celebrities aren’t just sharing how great they look, but when they achieve those looks through photoshop or cosmetic surgery.
Though photoshop has been around since the 90’s and used in many mainstream magazines and photoshoots, photo-editing has only recently become accessible to the general public; people like you and me (Posavac, 1999, 199). Apps like Facetune and Snapchat have made altering photos and appearance through manipulation and filters available to everyone. Facetune, which rose to prominence in 2017, gives users the power to do anything from whitening teeth to manipulating the shape of things, all with the touch of their finger (Tait, 2018, 38). This may be dangerous for women who are already dissatisfied with their appearance. Though Facetune gives the power to edit minor flaws, like a pimple or under-eye bags, it can also lead to a growing aversion to real features such as natural stomachs, lips, skin, and more. Facetune and photoshop can also be responsible for “[renarrowing] the standards of what is acceptable to show…making some traits invisible by making everyone look the same” (Tait, 2018, 38). On apps like Instagram, constantly seeing edited images can “erode self-esteem” and for people who take part in photo-editing it can “drive a wedge between the self posted online and the self reflected in the mirror” (Fagan, 2020, 29).
Photoshop adds fuel to the fire that is cosmetic surgery. Where cosmetic surgery used to be a taboo topic many tries to keep secret it has become popular and is advertised through social media without people consciously realizing it. From 2000 to 2018, the number of minimally invasive surgeries skyrocketed, with 18 million surgeries performed in just 2018 (Fagan, 2020, 29). While several factors go into why people cosmetic surgery, celebrities and social media influencers may have a growing role in why more and more are turning towards it. With celebrities having so much influence over beauty standards, women may use them as examples of what they want to look like, unaware of the fact that the celebrity’s looks are not usually achieved naturally. The connection between cosmetic surgery and beauty trends is blatantly obvious. Women want what society deems beautiful, and society makes a large profit off of the insecurities of women.
Teenagers spend hours on their phones, it’s as simple as that. With an average of about seven hours of screen time a day, a good amount of that time, if not most of it, is dedicated to social media (Managing the Effects, 2021). Screen time is already associated with health risks such as increased feelings of depression, anxiety, insomnia, and more, so when mixed with the pressure girls face to involve social media, those issues are only amplified (Managing the Effects, 2021). One connection researchers have drawn is that spending time on Instagram is related to increases in adolescents’ depressed moods, emphasizing that greater social media exposure negatively influences one’s mental wellbeing (Managing the Effects, 2021). Not to mention many social media platforms are based on a follower-like system where the more someone encapsulates a beauty standard, the more attention their profile receives. Seeing the large amount of attention some women receive on social media may lead other women to questioning why they don’t receive the same attention. Oftentimes, the blame for not looking as good as other women falls on themselves, which comes from toxic self-comparison and evaluation.
The main physical effects associated with social media are eating disorders, specifically ones that entail “severely [restricting] the amount of food [one] eats” or over exercising to compensate for possible weight gain (Mayo Clinic). Eating disorders have disproportionately risen amongst women over the last twenty years as well (McCarthy, 1990, 205). Though social media doesn’t directly cause someone to have an eating disorder, there’s no denying the association between the two that comes from living “in a culture that idealizes thinness in women” (McCarthy, 1990, 205). Sadly, girls in development, like during their teenage years, are highly impressionable. When they only consume media that tells them beautiful women have thin, toned, and less curvy body types, “it can increase their chance of developing eating disorder behaviors in order to obtain these body types” (Davis, 2016). Girls Empowerment Network conducted a survey and results showed that “out of overy 1000 adolescent girls surveyed, 88% of the girls believe that the media puts a lot of pressure on them to be thin (Davis, 2016).”
Women have been unconsciously taught from a young age that weight, waist, hip, or thigh measurements should be small, in fact the smaller the better. Over time, this has led to women feeling a stronger need to tie their self-worth and validation to their weight than men do, leading to solutions like unhealthy dieting. (McCarthy, 1990, 206). The problem with dieting in those situations though, is that people want results fast, so they may do things incorrectly, which can be deadly or lead to other physical consequences. It also doesn’t help that there are more dieting articles and tips written for women than for men (McCarthy, 1990, 206).
Unrealistic beauty standards are an extensive systemic issue that affect women and their perceptions of themselves in regard to the ‘updone’ women we see on the front covers of magazines or Instagram feeds. There’s no denying we are our own harshest critics; picking ourselves apart and demeaning our value especially when we compare ourselves to people we consider better than us. We invent and uphold insecurities based on the world around us, but it is vital to emphasize that the world around us, specifically the media we consume, is not the true reality. As long as women feed into the control society and media have over what is considered beautiful, they will never truly feel confident in their skin. If one day everyone in the world decided to love what they saw in their reflections, “we could slowly overcome a piece of a larger system that manipulates and seduces women into hating themselves” (Zeilinger).
Loving yourself and being confident in your own skin is easier said than done, and it’s hard face or overcome insecurities when your brain is hardwired to hate all the things social media tells you are unattractive, but it is necessary for future generations of young girls to foster a community where no one feels as though they have to look, dress, or act a certain way, as it is our individuality and uniqueness that make us beautiful.
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