Beauty Demands

‘I wanna look like I’m made of plastic’. So instructed my beautiful 40-year-old friend to a make-up artist in a well-known department store recently. Another 40-something friend tells me with pride that she spends £220 every month on painful laser facials. Yet another 40-something friend details her Botox and fillers regime to me. For myself, also in my 40s, I spend way too much on overpriced skincare creams and while I’m partial to a facial, I draw the line at needles and scalpels. The media and academia abound with stories and reports about how susceptible young women are to the lure of beauty treatments and the negative effect social media are having on their self-confidence.  In my own research I have listened to a beautiful young 20-year-old woman share with me her desire for fat transfer using the more ‘holistic’ process of taking fat from the arse to use in the face (cosmetic surgery goes woke?). But by focusing almost exclusively on young women’s participation in beauty...

[This piece was originally published in Healthy  magazine] We’re encouraged to think of ‘looking good’ as a moral imperative - if you don’t have a great body then there’s a sense that you must have let yourself go ( Widdows, 2018) . While appearance is key to how we present ourselves to the world, most of us are unnecessarily self critical and our relationships with our bodies suffer as a result. There are a number of issues at play here, primarily our urge to measure ourselves against others (social comparison theory). While some measures such as academic achievements are objective – qualifications prove what you can do – comparing appearance is subjective, and difficult to get into proportion. This works in tandem with self-discrepancy theory, which suggests we have three views of the self: the actual, the ideal – what we aspire to look like - and the ought – what we think we ought to look like. Evidence shows that our view of the ‘actual’ self is distorted by the other two...

The Good Childhood Report 2016 highlighted declining levels of girls’ happiness with their appearance in the UK, while boys’ happiness remains stable. There is now a sizeable gender gap in happiness with appearance among young people aged 10 to 15 in the UK. International comparisons show that this gender gap is by no means inevitable and does not exist in many countries. More Than A Quarter Of A Million Girls In Britain Are Unhappy, Report Reveals Huffington Post, 31 st August 2016 Differences between girls’ and boys’ happiness with their body and appearance have been a recurring theme of our research programme on children’s well-being since we launched our first survey report in 2010. Based on responses from over 6,000 children, it showed a growing gender gap in feelings about appearance as children got older. At ages 10 to 11, a similar percentage of girls and boys were unhappy with their appearance; but by the age of 14 to 15, twice as many girls than boys were unhappy with ...

The 2016 Girls’ Attitudes survey , out this week highlights – again – the importance of body image, body confidence, and generally how much appearance matters for young women in the UK today. Claims that ‘it’s the inside that counts’, or ‘beauty is only skin deep’ are hard to maintain in the face of such overwhelming statistics. You might send your 9 year old daughter off to school (as I do every day) telling her that you can find something beautiful in every face (which you can) and that kindness matters most of all (which it does), but she knows, as all girls know, that beauty matters too. A few of the headline statements, taken from page 3 of the report, remind us just how much it matters: ·          “47% of girls aged 11-21 say the way they look holds them back” ·          “From as young as seven, girls say they feel embarrassed and ashamed of how they look” ·    ...