Beauty Standards
Ever mindlessly scrolled through Instagram or TikTok whilst growing increasingly insecure about your own body? Well… same, and we’re definitely not alone. A survey of 227 female university students reported that women tend to compare their own appearances negatively with their peer group and celebrities, while browsing on social media.
Social media has pervaded various aspects of our life, without us even realizing. The mindset of sharing only the best side of ourselves on social media, the amount of consideration before putting a post up in order to portray this so-called perfect side of us, all play a role in affecting our perception of beauty. And at times, we might not even realise how much social media carves out a societal standard for beauty.
I’m most certainly sure many of you have seen the surge in the number of filters with “beautifying” effects. This “filter culture” is definitely playing a part in setting beauty standards as well. Covering the blemishes of one’s face, whitening one’s complexion, and making one’s nose tiny all play a role in stimulating this ideology of people’s perception of what beauty is. This has a major effect on our subconscious minds, setting a “criteria” for beauty, and encouraging more people to seek to reach such societal standards.
What is more worrying is the trendy challenges that have been circulating around social media. The fact that the earphone waist challenge, the A4 waist challenge, and many more other trends made its way around social media is indeed quite concerning. They encourage people to starve themselves to achieve what they perceive as a “perfect” body, but who in the world decided that only a thin waist was to be considered beautiful?
Who decided that being too thin, too tall, too unshapely, too full-figured, or vice versa was to be out of the bounds for society’s standards of beauty? When can we finally learn to accept everyone as who they really are, and their own way of beauty?
Of course, I admit that it would be a total lie for me to say that I, myself, have never tried to conform to such societal standards of beauty or have never been affected by such standards of beauty. However, it is time we all learn to embrace our own beauty, and accept everyone’s differences, because everyone is beautiful in their own ways.
By: Kayden Owee
