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Confidence Secrets From 4 Women Pushing Back Against Beauty Standards
Shutterstock / Prostock-studio. Beauty standards are engraved into girls from a young age. Our Barbies and dolls come perfectly packaged with their hair, makeup, and nails already done. Most of us played with those toys as we watched our mothers get dolled up for the day. Beauty seems fun and playful until we evolve into teenagers. Then, many of us feel the pressure to conform to trends and change our hair and makeup. The parts of ourselves we once deemed “just fine” have become our biggest insecurities. Our bodies, skin, and hair begin to change while comparison sets in. This, at times, creates a divide between women, mainly because we…
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Young women in China abandon traditional beauty standards to ‘imitate’ Western habits like wearing yoga pants, eating ‘white people’s food’
The phrase “white women aesthetic” recently emerged as a buzzword on the Xiaohongshu social media platform, accompanied by the slogan – “Question white women, understand white women, become white women” which is gaining currency online. The lifestyle switch is characterised by Lululemon yoga pants, Stanley thermos and “white people’s food” which is considered to be healthy. Yoga pants and yoghurt have emerged as a central component of the new lifestyle phenomenon. Photo: QQ.com Women are being drawn to a range of products, from tank tops and yoga pants to backpacks and thermos, indicating a shift towards a more relaxed and comfortable way of life. Central to the food component of…
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Who’s Really To Blame For Society’s Ridiculous Beauty Standards? Men Or Women?
Picture all the problematic, harmful trends that have come and gone in the last 30 years: waif-like figures and heroin chic in the late ‘90s and early 2000s, then, from the 2010s until now, the synthetic amalgamations of the waif-figure plus the “hard body” of the 1980s. While the former had many women and young girls starving and depriving themselves, the latter had influencers urging them to “just work hard at the gym” in order to obtain perfectly flat stomachs and thigh gaps, while at the same time having large boobs and butts (we all know, or should know, this look is greatly facilitated by plastic surgery). This isn’t to…