Beauty Whitewashed: How White Ideals Exclude Women of Color. For Elle’s Feb 2014 cover, one of these covers is not like the other At Beauty Redefined, we talk a lot about harmful media beauty ideals that become unquestioned norms in our minds. Things like extreme thinness, appearance-focused “fitness,” sex appeal, and photoshopping phoniness are rampant in media and normalized as our cultural ideals.
But one of the most oppressive ideals excludes anyone who isn’t … white. We call it the whitewashing of beauty. And it happens more often than you can imagine. Vanity Fair’s 2012 “Fresh Faces of Young Hollywood” features only white women on the cover … again. In a country where a full one-third of the population is black, Native American, Asian, Pacific Islander, Hispanic or Latina, the serious underrepresentation of women of color in media is really disturbing.
Since researchers have assumed that black girls were immune to the effects of thin-ideal media(1), communication scholar Kristen Harrison (2006) conducted a study aimed at testing this idea. Uncomfortable in our skin: the body-image report. Outside, on a warm morning in March, students at the University of the West of England are shading their faces with textbooks, legs rippling in the sun. Inside, in a cramped, bright room lined with ring binders labelled "Intimacy", the women who make up the world's only Centre for Appearance Research (Car) are talking quietly about perfection. I arrived here after following a trail of newspaper reports – on the effect of airbrushing in the media, on men's growing anxiety about their weight – reports used variously by politicians and educators to highlight the way our world is collapsing. It's here, with their biscuits and gentle, resigned chatter, that a team led by Professor Nichola Rumsey and Dr Diana Harcourt is compiling the research required to understand how we deal with changing attitudes to appearance, and along the way helping answer the question: why do we hate the way we look?
Two years ago I started writing a column for this magazine, illustrated by a photo of my face. Girls aged five worry about their body image, say MPs | Society. Girls as young as five now routinely worry about their weight and appearance while more than half the entire UK population is grappling with mental and physical problems relating to negative body image, according to a parliamentary report published on Wednesday. The pressure to achieve an unrealistic "body ideal" is now an underlying cause of serious health and relationship problems, according to a study from the all-party parliamentary group on body image. This pressure is "damaging society" by wreaking havoc with self-esteem and affecting progress at school and work.
The issue is no longer determined by gender, with body image now a major concern for boys and men as well as girls and women, the report concludes. Half of girls and a third of boys aged 14 have been on a diet to change their body shape, the document said, with youngsters exhibiting their parents' own anxieties.