It is kind of credulous how much debate has gone into beauty campaigns.
“Curvy women can be beautiful too!”
“Stop skinny shaming!”
“Black is beautiful!”
“Black is more beautiful than white.”
“Stop white shaming!”
“Guys like curvy.”
“Who cares about what guys like?”
“Stop wearing makeup, you are beautiful without it.”
“It is okay to wear makeup, but don’t overdo it….your face is not a coloring book.”
“Wearing lots of makeup means confidence!”
“Curly hair is beautiful too!”
“Curly hair is more interesting than straight hair!”
These are just some of the popular phrases many women have heard.

So much effort has gone into creating today’s standards of beauty; those magazines that endorse photoshopped bodies spark much of the controversy with beauty culture. It is obvious from looking at many celebrities photos, that the photoshopping does these few things: Alter body shape (usually making a woman thinner), clearing out skin blemishes/pores, making a woman more light skinned, and changing the hair texture. These things are translucent and flagrantly cause insecurities and contrastingly, vanity. Obviously not every girl is going to end up posing half naked for Vanity Fair and end up photoshopped, so it creates a social pressure for girls to look a certain way in their everyday lives.

Little me, was fascinated by how Beyonce was able to look white, as a black woman, in magazines. It gave me a hope that somehow I could transform the color of my skin. I spent hours on WikiHow trying to see how to naturally lighten skin, and I soon found myself on a specific food diet regime that claimed to make me white and beautiful.
Obviously, I am not the only one who yearned to be white, because girls of color for centuries have felt inferior to white girls, specifically the iconic “blond haired blue eyed” girl.

In more recent times, the black community has tried to overcome social standards of beauty in the media. Any hardcore instagrammer like myself, would know about the hashtag #Blackout which is intended to represent black people in the media better and more accurately. Although this is only one group of colored people, I was still impressed by this movement of confidence.

I scrolled through the hashtag, scouring through as many posts as I could trying to like as many as my little fingers could. I came across a caption that read “#Blackout because black girls are the most beautiful. Big lips, curves, and dark skin beats white skin.” There are probably many other similar captions out there, but I found myself kind of confused. I respected the other captions that read something along the lines of “I am beautiful no matter what society says” but the caption that elevated the black girl because of her features above white features did not feel right. I know that the media unofficially pretty much says “White features are better than black,” which is why it created such a problem. I did not understand how doing the exact same thing but in reverse was supposed to cancel out the harm done. How does replacing one standard of beauty with another make a difference?
Beauty is not the type of thing that can just be swapped from peoples to peoples.

“White people are always told they are the best, now let’s tell them they are inferior,” is how I read the caption. Even though I am neither black nor white, I was offended by the caption. I was offended that all the hard work of the beauty campaign of #Blackout to raise confidence was being flushed down the drain by this person. Wasn’t the whole point of the Blackout to prove that black people are as beautiful as white people? Not more than?

This post really got me thinking of standards of beauty and beauty culture in America as a whole. Beauty is a social construct, which means that it is something that society made up for really no reason. There is a quote I saw in a classroom somewhere… “When you stare at something long enough, you see what’s actually there rather than what you are supposed to see.” People are not innately born with the ideas in their head that “People with white skin are more beautiful” nor the other way around.

America is a country founded by white men who decided to dehumanize black people in order to have them as slaves, and in order to not feel like awful people as slaveowners, they put this label on people of color as “ugly.”
Now, what can we do to end this? How do we end beauty culture? The question is the answer.

We end beauty culture. We need to end the idea of “beautiful” as a whole. That word has no meaning anymore, anyways. It is a fad, a trend, a way to elevate some above others. 1920’s: Lean is beautiful, short hair is beautiful, delicate is beautiful. 2015: Long hair is beautiful, small waist and curvy is beautiful, big lips are beautiful. Kylie Jenner’s lip injections involuntarily ignited the idea of big lips as beautiful.

This caused people to hurt themselves because magazines dubbed her as more “beautiful.” This was also seen as cultural appropriation to many because big lips were now seen as “in style” even though many women of color naturally possessed these lips but they were not admired in the same way.

Lips barely hits the surface of a standard of beauty that it is fickle. Makeup. In the book “Love, Lashes, and Lipstick,” beauty guru/the author talks about the “Man pleasing makeup” which is the no makeup makeup look. She talks about how guys say they like girls who wear no makeup but they are actually ignorant and don’t actually like the average girl without makeup, but just girls that have makeup that looks like they have no makeup on….foundation, light pink gloss, concealer, dark eye roller. Getting rid of baggy eyes and blemishes and calling it a “no makeup look” is pretty insulting as it suggesting this is what the average girl should look like, and also that a girl shouldn’t wear bold colors simply because it cannot pass as natural and because guys aren’t into it. Then there are these dozens of articles that are titled “Reasons to go makeup free” or “The Perfect Amount of Makeup to Wear.” Keeping up with trends is tiresome and bluntly, dumb. The previously mentioned body type trends are dehumanizing. An ignorant youtuber recently gave “advice” to overweight people. Simply, she fat shamed and said that fat people disrespect themselves. The public responded in outrage. I picked up on two main themes in response videos: “You can be fat AND be beautiful,” and “Fat people are more healthy than anorexic models.” The first theme suggests that it is possible to be fat and beautiful, which came off to me as “You can still be beautiful...there is hope for you.” And the latter did the same thing as the white versus black debate, it elevated a group of people above another. I know that anorexia is a problem among the modeling industry, but the video creator was referring to skinny people in general (it was clear from the tone of voice and pictures.)
Once again, fat is a social construct. It varies from country to country, and does not necessarily correlate to the word “unhealthy.” The same way that skinny does not necessarily correlate to the word healthy or beautiful. I understand that physical attraction is a big part of relationships, but physical attraction is not the same thing as societal standards.
If society just throws away the word “beautiful,” and beauty culture as a whole, I think life will be so much better and happier. I’m always asked why I am irritated by beauty gurus and makeup artists on Youtube. It is not because I hate makeup (my eyeliner fetish is strong), it is because they perpetuate standards of beauty. I have no problem with the makeup gurus who show halloween makeup or have different types of style, but typical makeup keeps up standards of beauty and gets away with it by masking their “WEAR MAKEUP TO CONFORM” mottos with “WEAR MAKEUP TO BE CONFIDENT.” Most of the beauty gurus I have watched talk about how foundation is important because it minimizes pores, than concealer to make a girl look less tired and pimply, and mascara for longer lashes, contouring and highlighting for a certain type of nose and high cheekbones and defined jaw (AKA no chubby neck). It is frustrating! I also hate how they refer to their audiences as “Ladies” like girls are the only ones who wear makeup.

I went to a camp over the summer called “Spiral” at Dig In Farm which was about environmental design and activism and a bunch of other cool things. On the first day, the camp counselor said “For the next thirty days, we will not endorse ‘body talk.’ This means no compliments, insults, nor any discussion on physical appearance. This means no discussing each other or celebrities on how they look.” At first, I thought this idea was so stupid, because I thought that compliments raise one’s confidence, but by the end of the month I realized how amazing it was!

I realized that we live in a society that relies on each other’s opinions for the useless things and not the important things. We are not open minded to intellectual ideas and resolutions, but when someone insults our new haircut, we fall into a pit of despair filled with consuming insecurities. Even compliments kill our confidence because we find ourselves shaping our appearance based on what others find appealing. We are not molds for others to shape. We are liquid diamonds. Beautiful but ready to shape ourselves as WE wish, not at the will of others.

We need to stop shaming people for physically altering or sticking with their appearances- we need to stop shaming plastic surgery, piercings, tattoos. We need to stop shaming body types. We need to live confidently and let others do the same. Once we adapt to letting go of the standard of beauty, we can stop seeing what we are supposed to see, and see what is actually there.