toxic beauty standards throughout history and around the world
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#BeautyStandards #ToxicBeauty #HistoricalBeauty #GlobalStandards #CulturalBeauty #BodyImage

Eps 11: toxic beauty standards throughout history and around the world

— History

The podcast explores the harmful beauty standards that have existed across various cultures and historical periods. It delves into foot binding in ancient China, the use of lead-based makeup in Renaissance Europe, and the trend of neck elongation among the Padaung women of Myanmar. The discussion highlights how these practices often resulted in physical harm and were used to enforce patriarchal control. The podcast also examines contemporary beauty standards, such as the pressure to undergo cosmetic surgery and the influence of social media, emphasizing the ongoing global issue of unrealistic and damaging expectations of beauty.

Seed data: Link 1
Host image: StyleGAN neural net
Content creation: GPT-3.5,

Host

Leon Knight

Leon Knight

Podcast Content
Beauty standards have long been harmful and toxic, reflecting deeply ingrained social and cultural pressures that span centuries and continents. In ancient China, foot binding was a prevalent practice to achieve small, delicate feet, considered a mark of beauty and status. This practice resulted in severe pain and lifelong disabilities for countless women. Moving westward to Victorian England, a pale complexion and a tightly corseted waist were seen as epitomes of beauty. Women went to extreme lengths, using lead-based makeup and corsets that crushed their internal organs, leading to fainting spells and long-term health issues.

In Africa, some tribes valued elongated necks, prompting the practice of adding more rings around a young girl's neck to stretch it over years. This cultural norm not only led to physical deformities but also severe pain and spinal issues. Similarly, in the pursuit of beauty, women in ancient Greece were encouraged to bleach their hair with harsh chemicals and even ingest substances like arsenic to maintain pale skin, risking their health in the process. Moving to 20th-century America, the culture of the flapper in the 1920s and the super-skinny models of the 1990s exemplified the toxic beauty standards that promoted dieting and eating disorders as a means to achieve an elusive ideal body shape.

In contemporary South Korea, the influence of K-pop and K-beauty has led to a widespread surge in cosmetic surgeries to attain features like double eyelids and V-shaped jawlines, driven by a narrow and homogenized concept of beauty. This trend is mirrored in Iran, which has the world's highest rate of nose surgeries, as people strive to conform to Western beauty ideals. In Latin America, the exaggerated curves promoted by media icons have led to dangerous practices like illegal buttock injections and extreme body augmentations.

Such toxic beauty standards continue to evolve but consistently reflect the societal obsessions of their time, often at the expense of individual health and well-being. They reveal the lengths to which people will go to fit into an idealized form of beauty, perpetuated by cultural narratives and media influence, showing that these practices are truly a historical and global phenomenon.