The biggest common critique of the beauty industry is that it has created false insecurities in young women. The beauty industry in its effort to make more money have created a false reason to be insecure about things that are natural to the human body. Things like acne, stretchmarks, body hair, pores have become demonized and seen as things that need to change.

The Modern Beauty Standard

Beauty standards are ever fluctuating every generation has different standards. From rail thin bodies, to BBLs back to rail think and so on and so forth. The beauty standards for women shift and a different body type becomes the idea standard and every woman must conform to it in order to remain in social favor. The beauty industry used to use models to project a standard that is not easily reached by everyday people. Using people’s individual bodies to say that this is what every person should look like. That is still true, however the models and the people we are supposed to look up to for our standards can’t even met them, having to get plastic surgery to meet the impossible standard.

The use of filters is not inherently wrong however, the line between what people see as a filter and a natural face is non existent anymore. The beauty industry has created the standard for how people should look in order to sell people products. They are trying to sell an impossible standard. The ideal women, specifically, has no pores and no body hair so the beauty industry will try to sell a product that will fix it. These marketing campaigns to make it seem that they can easily be lying and making false claims. According to some research, only about 18% of advertisements actually demonstrated the product the way it would actually work.

BIPOC Bodies as Trends

Colonization had shifted the beauty standards. Ethnic features were demonized, things like dark skin and big noses were things forced to  be changed in order to not face deep deep discrimination. However, there seems to have been a shift. While in many countries being white is still as the most beautiful and that is still kind of true for the United States it seems as if BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color)’s bodies are more fashionable. There have been many trends that have allowed white women to appear more “ambiguous” without facing any of the negative side affects of being BIPOC. Because these body features like , big lips, are being popularized by white women they get called by those names. For example, big lips are colloquially called “Kylie Jenner lips”. Things that have been historically mocked on BIPOC people are being praised when they are on white people.

Having white people praised for BIPOC body features creates another level of dysmorphia for young BIPOC people. They not only have to be “perfect” for the social media, facetuned version of young people but they are compared to white people emulating their features and getting praised for it. It used to be that they were made fun of for having these features and now they are not as good as the white women on Instagram.