21st

Running head: BEAUTY STANDARD

Beauty Standard:

Abidah Binti Haji Mohd Rafee (1660**)

Kauthar binti Hafidz Rahimi (1660**)

Latifah binti Husaini (1660**)

Nur Amirah Zakirah binti Shazlen (1660**)

Sharifah Damia Al-Yahya (1660**)

IIUM CRESCENT

Writing Skills (HSA 0364)

Mohd Nazriq Bin Noor Ahmad

April 28, 2017

Introduction:

Putting a standard towards beauty affect society positively and negatively. However, negative outweighs the positive. As women, body image became something that makes them feel self-conscious about. Society tends to discriminate women who do not fit the conservative beauty standards by body-shaming and bullying them which make this a serious issue. However, beauty standard also motivates women towards a healthier lifestyle. According to Oxford Dictionary (2017), beauty is a combination of qualities that pleases the eyes and standard means a level of quality. This topic is going to discuss media that plays a big part in developing beauty standards, the race and nationality different preference on beauty and the different age group have different standards of beauty.

Unrealistic Beauty Ideals Set By Media

Advancement in technology over time has made our daily life easier including acquiring information in split seconds. Most of us rely on the information that is provided by mass media such as television, newspaper, magazine, radio and also the internet. Due to this prior reason, mass media can also set a benchmark on beauty standards as it indirectly influences the public by advertising the ideal body image of celebrities, models, and others that are included in the showbiz industry. To add, media also advertise a ‘solution’ to those who feel dissatisfied with their body image by undergoing a cosmetic surgery to look ‘beautiful and attractive’ like their idols.

For instance, in South Korea, there is a television program called “Let Me In” featuring people who have gone through cosmetic surgery procedures in order to get their desired body image according to what is portrayed by media in South Korea as ‘beautiful and attractive’.

As a result in advertising ‘beautiful women’ through media, it has negatively affects other women on their perception of their own body, and some of them even consider to undergo cosmetic surgery procedures (Ashikali, Dittmar, & Ayers, 2017) in order to look as beautiful and attractive as the women that are being advertised. Furthermore, fashion and cosmetic media can manipulate this motivation by implying that use of a specific product will make a woman attractive. (Singh & Singh, 2011).

Race And Nationality Different Preference On Beauty

The world consists various race and nationality, thus it would be biased and ignorant to set a standard of beauty as different race and nationality has different taste on what they call as beautiful. We can say that the beauty standards in every country are different. Not to forget that in each country, there also different race and culture that we need to take in consideration for determining the beauty standards. In Korea, for example, they prefer double eyelids rather than single eyelid and according to The Indian Express regarding eyelids ”It is argued that people get it done to look more western.”  (Rajvanshi, 2015). While for example in India the most popular trait in India would be their thick, radiant hair in which most of them use coconut oil to do the trick (Alexandre, 2016).

From one of our articles which entitled “Once More: Is Beauty in the Eye of the Beholder? Relative Contributions of Private and Shared Taste to Judgments of Facial Attractiveness” by Johannes Honekopp, he did an experiment on different preferences on facial attractiveness. The experiment was done using 20 Asian, 20 Black, and 20 Caucasian models photographs. These photographs were then shown to thirty-one participants. The participants consisted of 10 Asians, 11 were Black and 10 were Caucasian. As expected, the evaluations of same-race judges proved to be significantly more favorable than the evaluations of other-race judges. It can be normal that judges will rate photos of their own race best, and this ought to build the part of private taste since this kind of inclination makes little difference to face scores. The participants in Experiment 2 likely had most noteworthy introduction frequencies to individuals of their own race, and this would be required to add to a general possess race inclination (Honekopp, 2006).

In another article entitled “Shape and Significance of Feminine Beauty: An Evolutionary Perspective”, it was stated that Anglo-American students in a North American university have found that women suffer in self-esteem after comparing themselves with attractive models (Gutierres et al. 1999), hence supports the feminist argument that an emphasis on physical beauty can be oppressive to women and harm their body image and esteem (Singh & Singh, 2011).

It is interesting that different countries have their own standards for beauty but that did not open a lane for anybody to criticize or discriminate those who does not fulfill the certain standards and also those who come from another country to race on even cultures. At the end of the day, we are just beautiful as how we are created.

Standards Of Beauty Vary According To Age Group

Aspect of beauty standards differ from various era and generation, therefore Age Group plays a significant factor in judging their preferred ideal beauty standards. To prove that Age Group is an affecting factor experiment were carried out; the first was age group consisting of men and women with a variation of ages such as (18–85 years old), the samples had to choose the most attractive body shape (Singh & Singh, 2011). Moreover, the experiment results were shown that the Youth in the United States judged postoperative photographs (lower WHR) deemed to be attractive than the preoperative photographs with identical body weight (Singh & Singh, 2011).  Hence, this proves that various age group had different taste in ideal beauty standards, this is the main factor that causes a negative effect on ideal beauty standards, lowers a person's personal self-esteem because of society judgment of their ideal ‘perfect beauty’. Another experiment was carried out to see the effects of ‘generation gap’ being a cause of negative impact on ‘beauty standards’. One of the drawbacks of the research is the participant has the same demographic background such as age, ethnicity and educational background. There might be a chance that people with different backgrounds or different age will react differently to the advertisement  (Ashikali, Dittmar, & Ayers, 2017).

Lastly, models in all 3 experiment were mainly between 18- 37 years old. While the participants who were shown the picture of these models mainly range from 18- 40 years old (Honekopp, 2006). Having specific criteria on age group indicates the unjust and biased perception of idealistic ‘beauty standards’ dependent on the age and generation they find attractive in comparison to another. So basically, visual attractiveness is dependent on the specific age group. Inevitably they will prefer the features from the same age group. Thus, indicating that everyone has different standards of ‘beauty’ and should not be contended to one form of ‘beauty’.

Conclusion

According to Maya A. Poran (2002), “Although personal definitions of beauty indicate a similarity in beauty-ideology, perceptions of the cultural standard of beauty add a variety of dimensions to the beauty standards that are often overlooked” (p. 78). This has shown that the standard of beauty should not be based only on physical aspects but also on the inner aspects of an individual. The fashion and media industries play a big part to influence the society’s perception about how to be beautiful instead of encouraging the society to appreciate the beauty of themselves. The society’s norm of being beautiful should be changed as the physical beauty is a gift from God that can fade away anytime, however, inner beauty is something that decides the quality of an individual.

References

Alexandre, S. (8 March, 2016). This is How Beauty Standards Differ Around the World . Retrieved from Slice: http://www.slice.ca/beauty/photos/how-much-beauty-standards-differ-around-the-world/#!smiling-indian-woman

Ashikali, E.-M., Dittmar, H., & Ayers, S. (2017). The Impact of Cosmetic Surgery Advertising on  Swiss Women's Body Image  and Attitudes Toward Cosmetic Surgery. 13-21.

Beauty. (2017). In OxfordDictionaries.com. Retrieved from https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/beauty

Honekopp, J. (2006). Once More: Is Beauty in the Eye of the Beholder? Relative Contributions

of Private and Shared Taste to Judgments of Facial Attractiveness. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 199-209.

Johns, M. M., Zimmerman, M., Harper, G. W., and Bauermeister, J. A. (2017). Resilient Minds and Bodies: Size Discrimination, Body Image, and Mental Health Among Sexual Minority Women. Psychology of Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity, 4(1), 34-42.

Lastname, I. (2010). Title of article with only first word capped or any proper noun. Title of Publication, 22(3), 325-340. doi or URL.

Poran, M. A. (2002). Denying Diversity : Perceptions of Beauty and Social Comparison Processes Among Latina, Black, and White Women. Sex Roles, 65-81.

Rajvanshi, K. (11 August , 2015). Who’s beautiful? How beauty is defined around the world. Retrieved from The Indian Express: http://indianexpress.com/article/lifestyle/fashion/whos-beautiful-how-beauty-is-defined-around-the-world/

Singh, D., & Singh, D. (2011). Shape and Significance of Feminine Beauty: An Evolutionary Perspective. 723–731.

Standard. (2017). In OxfordDictionaries.com. Retrieved from https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/standard