The Views on Beauty in Modern Society

Beauty is a highly valued attribute in the eye of the beholder, that surrounds us every single day. The idea of beauty is completely perspective and interpretation. The word beauty can be used to describe the Pacific Ocean, the incredible Rocky Mountains, a Mona Lisa painting, a National Geographic action shot of a bird, or maybe even an old farmhouse. Beauty is described by things that we can see and find attractive. Beauty is also used to describe people, which is something our society and culture obsess over. With all this focus on beauty in people and the pressure to be accepted by beauty standards, the true character of beauty is misleading and often confused, creating a deceptive mask that is an issue in our society.

Where you’re from is a main issue in what influences your idea of beauty and what people are willing to do to become beautiful. According to Lola Montez, “This difference of opinion with respect to beauty in various countries is, however, principally confined to color and form, and may, undoubtedly, be traced to national habits and customs.” Through media, people are seeing images daily of beauty standards that are unattainable. This can be discouraging for people. Discouraging enough that people tend to forget that these standards vary from all different cultures and places in the world. For example, in places similar to the United States women are praised and valued for their body figure and ability to birth children. Women with broad hips and larger breasts are considered the ideal figure to be beautiful in the U.S. Many of the beauty standards our society has made seem acceptable can be hard to accomplish, and can be hurtful to any man or woman who doesn't fit in with the specifications. This creates this sense of desire for change. Also Montez states, “A Chinese belle must be fat, have small eyes, short nose, high cheeks, and feet which are not larger than a man’s finger. In the Labrador Islands no woman is beautiful who has not black teeth and white hair.” The author also proceeds to explain many other places in the world with extremely different beauty standards. These different cultures has different standards and beauty expectations. These standards cause people to change who they are in order to conform to the standards.People are exposed daily to media, to celebrities in particular. Feeding the mind images of these pictures suggesting how people are supposed to look. Many people strive to achieve the highly unrealistic standards of beauty that we are obsessed with. Being unable to fulfil the expectations, people start disliking themselves and how they look. People who are born with disabilities don’t follow these standards, often find it hard to be self accepting and confident. Perfection in our society is in very high demand, but perfection doesn’t actually exist. Unrealistic and unhealthy images in the media often promote these unhealthy standards and causes this demand for perfection. For example, the famous corset well known and used by celebrities like Kim Kardashian for pinching in waists and making them slimmer. For example when Montez talked about how Chinese women’s feet must be smaller than a man’s finger, this came about the Chinese Foot Binding method. Women who had larger feet and didn’t fit the beauty standards used a method called binding which would break the foot bones and decrease the foot size by straining these bones of their natural form. Author Diane Ackerman talks about other ways that people alter their bodies to look beautiful. The author says, “European women were willing to eat Arsenic Complexion Wafers to make their skin whiter; it poisoned the hemoglobin in the blood so that they developed a fragile, lunar whiteness.” This proves that even women in 850 B.C. women were willing to harm themselves to feel accepted by society and achieve what society considered perfection.

Perfection can’t be achieved. There will always be flaws because beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Basically, beauty is a perceptive aspect of life and it depends on you to identify for yourself what beauty is, and who and what is beautiful. Author Amy Larocca talks about famous actress Christina Hendricks and how her body size, being a larger woman, goes in and out of fashion. This affects her casting and movies and her different actress and cast roles. Producers cast different actresses and actors based on how they look and not their acting talent. Christina Hendricks experienced this effect in her career being cast strictly for how she looked and who she was playing the role of. Media tries to expand to all sizes of actors, actresses, and models. However, society focuses solely on accepting the extremely underweight and extremely overweight people. The media glorifies these extremes and these unhealthy body types by telling them they’re beautiful. Media confuses beauty by appearance rather than character.

Overall, society values beauty and appearance rather than character. Society glorifies unhealthy and unrealistic expectations and confusing beauty for perfection. Beauty is a deceptive mask that creates these standards of beauty that aren’t attainable. It is only attainable if people are willing to harm themselves in the process of making themselves look perfect. Our cultures image of beauty does obscure true qualities and characteristics of people.