4 Beauty Standards That Are Statistically Nearly Impossible
It may sound counterintuitive, but the best way to be considered beautiful in any society is to be perfectly average. Of course, no one person is literally perfect, or literally average. But that hasn’t stopped every world culture from developing harmful, painful, physically impossible tricks to help you get as close as possible!
What Does It Mean to Be ‘Average’?
You might picture the nerdy girl who suddenly becomes prom date material when she takes off her glasses. But “averageness” in the beauty world is much more mathematical. It refers to the face that arises when making a composite of lots of people of the same age, gender or location. When overlaying a whole bunch of photographs, the portrait that emerges is almost universally considered by viewers to be highly attractive. The evolutionary explanation is that anything outside of the norm might be indicative of a mutation, which is a reproductive risk.
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The University of Toronto found that one celebrity’s facial proportions were startlingly close to the average of all women in their study: Jessica Alba. If Jessica Alba is what we should aspire to to be average? The rest of us are cooked.
Skin and Hair Tones
Eyes and lips that are significantly darker than the surrounding skin are often considered highly attractive across different cultures. That’s where makeup comes in. Bright colors are only part of the equation; things like lipstick and eyeshadow are designed in part to create a stronger contrast to the skin tone. Another way to create that contrast is, problematically, to lighten the skin, and people have used all kinds of harmful techniques to achieve it (think arsenic- and lead-based makeup). Interestingly, all of the above applies only to women. In men, a contrast between facial features and skin tone is considered unattractive.
Hair color is just as confounding. Despite only occurring naturally in about 2 percent of people, both women and men often answer that blond hair is the standard of beauty to which all other hair colors are compared. While this is true in some places you might expect, like Sweden, surveys and studies of media representation have shown over and over again that people tend to find darker hair more attractive. Conversely, blonde women in Singapore, for example, feel that their hair actually reduces their femininity. And advertisements in Asia tend to show blonde women as jealous of their darker-haired counterparts.
Posture and Movement
If I know anything about being hot, it’s that symmetry is king. That’s why Tom Cruise is the hottest man on Earth: He has one big tooth right in the middle of his face. It’s true, look it up!
Facial features, broadly speaking, are considered hotter when they’re symmetrical. Arms and legs, too, need to be the same basic length. But this all flies out the window the second you start to move. One study found that women who walk with a hip swing, and men who walk with a shoulder sway, doubled their perceived attractiveness. Faking a limp might be the surest way to lock in that prom date.
The “contrapposto” posture has come up over and over, across time and cultures, as the hottest way to hold your body. To hear it described, you’d think it’s some kind of deluxe scoliosis: hold your weight on one leg, with the other bent, causing the hips to dip unevenly, and the spine to slither up to arms that twist off of their natural axis.
But when you see it in action, you’ll get it. Picture any marble baddie from Ancient Greek and Roman times; they’re probably slouched in a cool, somewhat distracted, clearly active way. In fact, the earliest known contrapposto sculpture comes from 480 BCE — people have thought a distracted nonchalance was hot since at least the Iron Age. Fast forward to modern times, and brain scans have shown that the attractiveness region of the human brain lights up like a Christmas tree when viewing a woman in the contrapposto position.
Small Feet, Long Neck, Can’t Lose?
Body modification takes many forms. Foot binding may be the most well-known example, even though it’s largely been out of practice for over a century. Young girls would have their feet tightly wrapped so that they’d appear to remain small as they grew. You know how 25 percent of your bones are in your feet? Foot binding would cause all those bones jangling around in there to contort as they fought for real estate. It hurt like hell, but was a surefire way to be seen as upper class, as no one could live a working-class life with painful baby-sized feet. The 1911 Xinhai Revolution finally killed off the practice (along with the Chinese monarchy).
A similar practice is the use of neck elongation rings in Myanmar. Starting at the age of five, some girls have rings permanently installed around their necks, adding about two per year until they have 24 rings in total. They don’t actually stretch their neck bones, so much as they erase their clavicles and compress their rib cages to give the appearance of a longer neck. Neck elongation is still a status symbol to this day, but it’s a practice that’s giving modern parents pause.
Like skin tone, hair color and posture, beauty-oriented body modification is often just smoke and mirrors designed to make the most powerful (and perhaps dumbest) people in a society say “Yowza!” while their heart-shaped pupils throb out of their heads.
