A look into beauty standards through viral internet campaigns

Anna Ruth Ramos | Staff Writer

It is difficult to define an expansive word such as beauty. Nevertheless, what we and who we may consider beautiful varies across individuals. Is it the timeless, iconic and curvy Marilyn Monroe? Is it the waifish, très chic Kate Moss? Is it the ever-Instagram and runway-ready Gigi Hadid or the alternative Kardashian, Kendall Jenner?

Every culture has an ideal beauty. One’s cultural ideal may differ from another, but does it mean that one is better than the other? What if beauty doesn’t have to be sexy versus cute, fitspo (promoting the “fit” lifestyle) versus thinspo (promoting thinness), pale or tan? What if beauty is just being?

Representations of Beauty

On Nov. 18, 1999, a woman’s face digitally created with “a mix of several races” graced “The New Face of America” special issue of TIME magazine. It predicted that a diverse face would be the ideal beauty of the future, yet fast forward 17 years later–and the represented faces we see aren’t as diverse as we’d think.
Forbes magazine features Jennifer Lawrence as the highest-paid actress in 2016 and Gigi Hadid stands as the highest-paid model. In the last year, People magazine named Sandra Bullock as “The World’s Most Beautiful.” All coming from similar caucasian backgrounds, the 1999 diverse face of the future still looks the same. Society is left wanting some kind of representation, yet the media and Hollywood fails in representing all kinds of body types, looks and cultures.

However, with the new age of social media, people have found a way of representation by doing it themselves – through viral social media campaigns.

Online users have found a way to make a statement about what beauty is by creating hashtags on platforms such as Twitter and Instagram. If the hashtag is powerful enough to make others feel like they belong in that category, it can turn into a worldwide trend, otherwise known as a hashtag campaign.

In May 2016, 17-year-old Filipino-American Caitlin Delim started the hashtag #PraisinTheAsian to present and defy Asian stereotypes perpetuated by mainstream American media. According to The Huffington Post, what started as a class project turned into a Twitter hashtag campaign as thousands participated in Delim’s campaign, posting selfies with the hashtag #PraisinTheAsian to celebrate the different Asian ethnic groups. Her campaign united South Asians to East Asians, defying the single-identity stereotype and celebrating their beauty as they are.

Additionally, earlier this year a campaign called “Unfair and Lovely” was launched in Texas by two University of Texas at Austin students, Pax Jones and Mirusha Yogarajah. According to an interview with SELF magazine, for Jones, the campaign was “developed to combat underrepresentation of dark skinned people of color in media.” It’s not just about colorism for her as a black woman but how these experiences are similar in terms of her counterparts in India and Sri Lanka who are “dark and South Asian,” just like her models – campaign co-founder Mirusha and her sister, Yanusha. The campaign is also an allusion and a jab to a whitening cream called Fair and Lovely which considers itself as “hope” to Asian women who desire lighter skin to feel better about themselves.

On the other hand, representation isn’t just about skin color but also about body types, age and everything in between. The Dove “Real Beauty” campaign empowers women to feel good about themselves as is, cellulite and all. While the advertisements were critiqued for judging women on the physical rather than the smarts (such as from Ann Friedman of The Cut), Dove’s “Real Beauty” advertisements have become viral videos, such as Dove’s “Real Beauty Sketches” with 80 million views.

Beauty is Subjective

Even though representation is important, it’s still a feat to acknowledge and portray beauty as it is in all forms for women worldwide. Someone may always feel misrepresented or not represented at all just because of the vast possibilities in which a certain look can be featured – an exact look is something rare. Many studies have shown and continue to show that different cultures vary in their definition of beauty. What is viewed beautiful for one society doesn’t necessarily equate the same thing to another and that’s just the way it is.

On August 2015, Buzzfeed posted a study––originally conducted by a UK-based online doctor service––that asked 18 female designers to alter one woman’s photograph via Photoshop. Each designer was “to make her more attractive to the citizens of [their] country,” and the results were highly different across the board. Seeing the photos gave a much clearer view of what different countries in the world perceive as beautiful, such as China and Italy putting a higher significance on smaller waists a very thin look overall. However, the countries differed in skin tone as Italy preferred a tan complexion while China had a fondness for pale skin.

In a much earlier and even more viral video post, journalist Esther Honig sent a picture of herself to “photoshop experts around the world, [telling] them, ‘Make me beautiful.’” The end result: varying skin tones, levels of make-up and added cultural accessories. For Honig’s American-edit, Honig had a much more pronounced Photoshop editing–which is something to be expected in a highly-altered, airbrushed magazine cover culture, contributing to America’s standards of beauty.

With so many different standards of beauty globally and in our own media alone, we are often left discouraged and misrepresented; left placing ourselves in a beauty spectrum. Yet beauty’s subjective standards show us that we shouldn’t try to fit into one box or place ourselves on a beauty spectrum, as the only way to be, is to be you.