When I was in middle school, I felt terrible about my appearance. It seemed like everyone else was a “pretty girl” and I was some kind of disgusting creature masquerading as a human being, However, I knew enough about myself and what I was going through at the time to make one choice that was in my best interest. Despite my insecurity, I decided not to buy or wear makeup, because I knew that if I did, I would start to feel incomplete without it; I would not actually become comfortable with myself. The makeup would not truly help me become more confident, it would only serve as a coping mechanism. I did not want to cope: I wanted to be able to look in the mirror without feeling disgust or disappointment.
The other factor in this decision was that I was and am deeply critical and slightly suspicious of the beauty industry. While products like makeup occasionally lean more toward a form of artistic or personal expression, which I fully endorse, more often than not they come across as existing simply to be sold. What I mean by that is that they exist in keeping with the long history of the beauty industry inventing insecurities in order to sell products. For example, there was a time when most women did not shave their legs, but then, as dresses got shorter, someone realized they could make money. There was nothing wrong with not shaving before this happened.
Advertisements for beauty products, especially older ones, did not hesitate to place women in scenarios in which they would be outright ostracized if they did not quickly fix the newest fabricated flaw. Whether you didn’t shave, were too skinny or too curvy, the person who conformed to the standard and used the product would be accepted and beloved, while the mere sight of you, not in possession of the ideal, would be shunned. That’s how you sell a beauty product, though, you convince people that they need it, because who would want to be ostracized?
The terrible thing is that if it was once fully socially acceptable to decline leg-shaving, for example, that’s no longer the case. The beauty industry has created a culture where certain traits are seen only as flaws and others are uplifted as things everyone should desire. Leg-shaving is only semi-necessary now because the industry created a pressure that would only build over time as more and more people began to feel ugly for not shaving. In this way, the industry has also warped our understanding of what human beings naturally look like. Because we are surrounded by images of flawlessness and agelessness and this singular type of beauty that we are apparently meant to strive for, we are unable to see ourselves clearly.
Even worse, beauty products and beauty itself are marketed almost exclusively towards women, and the societal pressures and insurmountable expectations they perpetuate really only apply to women. It is the very picture of an unfair double standard. Men are allowed to age, allowed to be imperfect, and generally understood to be more than their looks. While there are certainly other standards at play, such as the need to be strong and capable, we as a society find it a lot easier to overlook those expectations than the need for women to be beautiful. You don’t hear of an incredibly shallow male character being written into a movie just to sit there and look strong, be the leading lady’s love interest alongside a contrastingly well-developed all-female cast, and provide eye candy for the audience. I trust, however, that you can think of a few examples of the opposite.
Beyond being harmful for women, this double standard also pits the two ideals against each other. Young boys often wish to avoid “looking like a girl” at all costs, and people are further shoehorned into one of two roles. Not only does it make people overthink the smallest things, such as a girl wondering if the shape of her eyebrow makes her look mannish (and therefore bad), it leaves no room to move beyond these constraints, and reinforces the idea that not only gender, but beauty, is immovably binary.
We must accept that our cultural idea of beauty is not only incredibly unrealistic at times, but inextricably tied to traditional gender roles. Both ideas exert cultural and social pressures that put people in boxes, perpetuate stereotypes and a single ideal way to look and act, and ignore that humans are animals with a diverse population that deserves better than to spend time fretting about appearances and feeling disgusted by ourselves just for displaying normal human variation.