Throughout history beauty standards have shifted in many different directions; in the past century, however, the beauty standards in the United States have been defined by Hollywood’s picture-perfect standards. Makeup to get rid of the blemishes on a woman’s face and tight dresses to fit that hourglass figure. Anything less than perfection wasn’t acceptable back then, and from what people considered to be the peak of beauty, it snowballed into everyone wanting to become that beauty.
Any semblance of fat on a woman was scorned and propagated as undesirable to the masses. Fashion runways had models that were so skinny they looked like they were starving. Designer dresses were fitted to this perfect hourglass shape, and the model had to adjust to the dress, not the other way around.
This propaganda created mass paranoia that instilled fear. The mere mention of gaining weight strikes fear in the hearts of many even today. Monitoring what you eat for your health is one thing; it’s important to maintain a healthy diet but living in fear of the mere idea of gaining weight in order to cling onto these unhealthy and unrealistic beauty standards has caused problems.
Plus-sized people face alienation and regular insults because of the way they look, and fear of this alienation and ridicule further propagate these unhealthy and unrealistic beauty standards.
In my opinion the progress made in the past decade has done a great service to dispelling these unrealistic standards, allowing people to live comfortably in their own skin. Nobody should be alienated or insulted for the way they look, and we should propagate beauty values that encourage health over fashion. Too many people even today fear the idea of straying outside of the beauty standard inside their heads, and the world should work to change this idea over time, so nobody has to live in fear like this ever again.
