Modern Spin on the Unattainable Beauty Standards: The Commodification of Female "Insecurity

 

By Baby C

Renee Engeln, in her book *Beauty Sick: How the Cultural Obsession with Appearance Hurts Girls and Women*, states, "Chronic body monitoring is a ridiculous price to pay for fashion," but as women, we pay it all the time in dozens of different ways. One may argue that the predominance of social media, especially platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter, just to mention a few, is responsible for the "mania of beauty," but taking a deep dive into history proves otherwise.

During the Renaissance period in Europe, curvy bodies were hailed as the beauty standard; they were thought to symbolize wealth and fertility. Beautiful women were regarded as plump. Women constricted their breathing, wore tight corsets, and full skirts because that helped accentuate their curves and bodies. Sounds similar?

The famous BBL (Brazilian Butt Lift) surgical procedure made its debut in medical journals in the year 1969. Dr. R. Bartels was credited with performing the first BBL procedure ever. Initially, BBLs were only accessible to the rich and famous celebrities, but now, in the year 2024, everybody and anybody can do it—unauthorized, unsafe, illegally. By whatever means, BBLs are being performed.

For centuries, capitalism and beauty standards have walked hand in hand, never letting go of each other as they lead women to the tunnel of body mutilation, self-depreciation, and insatiable hysteria. Housewives in the 1940s would watch television in black and white and get drawn to adverts portraying "skinny blonde" women as the superior woman, but not without providing solutions for her inability to fit such standards. Magazines in the '90s featured beautiful models and actresses on their cover pages, and that innocent 13-year-old girl couldn't wait to get back home from school to scan through the pages of these beauty magazines, noting down the problems she had and the problems she was yet to have, along with the solutions to these problems, so she, at 13, could be a beautiful, wanted woman.

The heroin-chic aesthetic of the 2000s capitalized on the drug addiction of models, actresses, and singers, framing their pain as a chic, skinny, edgy fashion trend. The 2010s and the current times we live in have seen a preeminence in fillers, Botox, makeup, skincare obsession, and BBLs. Beauty standards keep evolving; capitalism takes on different forms, but the effect remains the same. Beauty standards are also inherently racist, giving black women crumbs by delving into colorism and dancing around texturism.

So in reality, black women do not fit these beauty standards patriarchy gets. How much more can women take? How much more should women take? The constant surveillance of aesthetic trends—the "that girl" trend to the "vural girl" trend—is our life simply a performance to participate in? Beauty standards do not view beauty as a whole but instead segment it, from the shape of your head to the color of your hair to the texture of your hair, the shape of your eyes, nose, lips, presence of smile lines, symmetrical face, absence of blemishes, color of your skin, the hair growing on your body, your weight, and everything you innately possess. 

There's a common saying: "You're not ugly; you're just broke," dividing beauty into class and wealth, providing yet again solutions to the problems they created—problems that never existed in the first place. Then we find ways to purchase products to fix problems we may not even see. Ultimately, we ourselves become products to be consumed, and the cycle continues.

The irony of these destructive standards is in their eternity, their big secret: beauty standards are unattainable for everybody. No woman can fully attain the standards patriarchy sets because those standards have a time frame: youth. Older women are not part of those standards, so even if you achieve these standards in your youth, it’s short-lived. Then you would have to live to see the beauty you strive so hard for fade away before your very eyes, like smoke going up in air, and you would watch and cry, getting choked because patriarchy does not give free gifts. Beauty was made for man and not man for beauty.

In the progressive awareness of these unattainable standards, the blame has fallen on the very victims of this cycle. We can see examples in the way the media demonizes femininity, slut-shames women, and brands them with vanity and gold-digging. How are we blaming the victims who simply want a taste of the privileges beauty offers? No, they aren't privileges; they are basic human rights beauty has stolen. It's no longer a want; it's a need, a survival skill, and in this cruel world, only the beautiful survive.

So no, Kylie Jenner did not create beauty standards; she's just a victim of them. It would do us good as a society to call out the patriarchy, dismantle the standards, and let women live as they are—not as puppets, not as ornaments to adorn their surroundings, or to view them simply as segments of their body that they do not own, but as multifaceted, complex living creatures with goals, dreams, and passions.

Beauty is a part, not a whole; a segment, not a definition. Beauty obsession is a mental and physical sickness, and it is our job as enablers and partakers of this sickness to first realize we are sick, seek help, and offer help.

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