A giant leap backwards for womankind

“New year, new me!” We’ve all heard it. We’ve probably all said it, when these first few days of January roll around each year. Nothing wrong with fresh starts and new motivations.

But when it comes to its intersection with the pressures of beauty standards on women – and increasingly on men – it is far less benign than we might think. In fact, trying to be the “new” latest beauty ideal is the opposite of a fresh start and motivation that can deliver benefits.

It is, in fact, a surrender to the old trap in which women find themselves: their worth being judged by how well they measure up to an arbitrary societal beauty standard. Such beauty standards are, by their construction, also impossible to meet. And even if they are met, they are ever-changing.

The focus of this discussion isn’t about getting fit and healthy, or shedding the kilos that might have been amassed over an indulgent holiday period, or as in my case, the aftermath of grief and bereavement. It’s about how beauty standards are enmeshed with the goal of self-improvement. In fact, after some years of hopefulness in the West that lessons about self-esteem and tackling harmful fashion and beauty models were finally paying off, it feels like we are taking a giant step backwards.

The tightening of beauty standards at a time when women are seeking greater autonomy and pushing back on a revival of misogyny is, of course, no surprise. One of the greatest insults lobbed at women fighting for their rights is that they are “ugly”: a manifestation of the “beauty currency” that women are deemed to have. This beauty currency in the West right now is about youthfulness, fertility, traditional femininity (encapsulated by the “tradwife” movement) and a return to slimness even verging on the skinny.

We don’t need to look far to see how societal reaction to women asserting their rights is manifesting in the tightening of these beauty standards – and the worrying thing is how women themselves, particularly young women, are adopting these in a way that they see as empowering.

Take the case of preventive Botox, being adopted by women as young as 18, who are worried about their wrinkles (in their teen years!). The paradox of using a form of treatment to get ahead of wrinkles, but then may well cause wrinkles, should not be lost on us. Evidently, the fear of ageing is stronger than ever in youngsters.

There are two problems here. One is that it is often forgotten that wrinkles and ageing are impossible to cover up, because they happen to all women. Second – as I discovered when I researched and published a book for girls about what it means to be beautiful – beauty standards are always shifting.

In the Stone Age, voluptuous women were said to be all the rage, the puffy cherub “Rubenesque” types were once desirable, and then the 1990s and 2000s brought us “size zero” models along with the rise of eating disorders in teenage girls.

The skinny silhouette also seems to be back. The editor of Vogue magazine voiced her concerns at the end of last year of the return of especially skinny models. It ties in with the availability and desirability of Ozempic, a weight loss medication seen as a quick fix to reach that preferred body type.

Even children are now entangled in beauty standards, with those below 10 years following full blown skincare routines. My nine-year-old daughter is telling me how her peers have their own portfolio of products and bedtime processes.

Embracing such beauty standards is worryingly being seen as a form of empowerment, a way to push back on the “have it all” years of feminism.

But falling back to defining women’s worth by how well they adhere to an idealised form of femininity is to give credence to the idea that womanhood is defined by how you look, defined by others. It’s a trap to think that success lies in monetising a kind of beauty that is seen to diminish with age – even if social media can make it for a select few.

It’s a bitter pill, but when self-care is tied to harmful beauty ideals and reducing self-worth to beauty, self-care can become self-harm.

But there’s nothing new in that. Societal beauty ideals have usually been about making women feel that they are not quite good enough: not fair enough, not tall enough, not slim enough, not young enough, not smooth enough, not curvy enough. Not enough. It is usually about leaving women feeling bad about themselves.

Which is why the most revolutionary thing women and girls can do is to look in the mirror and feel good about what we see.