How Beauty Standards Differ Across The World

What does it mean to be beautiful? Is beauty thick with fleshy thighs and back rolls or skinny with a trim waist and collar bones or does beauty mean light skin or bronzed, dark melanin skin?

Does beauty mean to have thick lips or thin ones or a flat nose or a pointed one? Does it mean you have to be toweringly tall or petite? These questions are not limited to the females, for the males you might wonder if to be handsome means a full beard or a shaved face, a toned body or a chubby one, and so on.

The problem is that many people suffer from low self-esteem and feelings of inadequacy because they feel that they are not beautiful enough, you might even be reading this article and wonder if you even meet society’s beauty standards or you might have scrolled through Instagram or any other social media platform only to be flooded with images of supposedly perfect people.

It is easy to feel your pain, the society has always found a way to impose its stifling expectations, if you suffer from low self-worth or you’ve ever asked the question “Am I beautiful?” because you have compared what you see in the mirror every day to what society says about beauty, then this article is for you, read on to discover beauty standards across the world that will shock you and then you just might realize that you don’t have to conform to society’s standard after all.

It might interest you to know that beauty standards change all the time, across cultures and as the years go by. In this article, we’ll explore what beauty is today, the beauty standards across different countries and cultures, and how these standards have changed over time.

What Are Beauty Standards?

Beauty standards are the expectations set by a particular group of people based on what they define beauty to be. Each culture keeps changing its idea of what it means to be beautiful, some of them are;

1. Korea; in Korea, the standard of beauty is very unrealistic, women are expected to have extremely white porcelain skin; skin that has no blemish, because of this, the cosmetic industry’s sale of face masks and other skincare products has skyrocketed to meet the demands of the citizens.
2. Australia; in this country, the ideal woman is expected to have bright red lips, skin that is tanned and pink blushed cheeks.
3. Thailand; Thai women strive for exceptionally white skin, going as far as staying away from the sun just to avoid the darkening of their skin, the hunger for beauty goes as far as striving for a nose that is pronounced.
4. Burma; in this country, the beauty expectations are frankly weird, because according to their tribe, the longer your neck, the more beautiful you are believed to be, because of this, women pile up metal coils on their neck to elongate it more.
5. Nigeria; Nigerians and most Africans believe that a beautiful woman is thick and curvy as opposed to skinny. According to them, a skinny woman is not feminine. This opinion still varies among individuals though.
6. America; even though America is a world power, they are not left out of the stifling beauty standards train, in America, blue eyes and long healthy hair are one of the major factors that make a female to be considered attractive.
7. France; surprisingly, as opposed to the expectations of other countries, in France attention is not paid as much to make-up as it is to natural beauty, the beauty standards are much less restricting just like Romania which is another country where makeup is not so important to be considered beautiful.
8. Argentina; the beauty standards of Argentina are the complete opposite of France and Romania, in Argentina, much emphasis is placed on makeup, such as fixing false lashes, bright lipstick, and seemingly perfect skin.
9. Chile; in Chile, a woman with lots of jewelry is considered to be beautiful.
10. Italy; the societal expectation of an Italian woman is that she should have smooth, polished skin and thin eyebrows that accentuate her face.
11. Brazil; the women in brazil focus less on bigger busts, rather the standard of beauty there is more geared towards a bigger butt and toned legs.
12. Philippines; for a woman to be considered beautiful in the Philippines, she should have very long dark luscious hair, a chiseled face, and attractive lips.

What Should We Do About These Beauty Standards?

In summary, the western world typically views beauty as being tall, very slim, and still curvy with an hourglass figure, while Africans mostly regard thick curvy women as the epitome of beauty.

Conforming to these beauty standards will only result in dissatisfaction on your part because you can never please society and you do not need to. If you have a personal idea of what your body goals are then it is okay to strive to achieve that, the problem comes when you want a certain body or face type because society says so even when you do not like it. Imagine a scenario where the current rave is a chiseled face or let’s say big lips and you want to fit in so you go under the knife to achieve that look, it comes out pretty well and you receive unending compliments, but after two years, there is a new trend where only people with round faces and thin lips are considered beautiful!

What Happens Then?

That would be disastrous for you because those physical traits you suffered so much to achieve would no longer be considered beautiful. All the risks you took would have been in vain. Such a thing would leave you feeling beat down and dissatisfied.

We are all made with unique traits that make us exceptional, you most likely won’t look exactly like that star celebrity on TV and that’s perfectly okay. When we begin to embrace this concept of individuality, the idea that you are inherently beautiful, then this epidemic; the suffocating beauty trends and standards imposed on us since the beginning of time will no longer be oppressing.