Beauty, one of the primary values that have been attributable to human beings for centuries and which has been one of the least tangible and most argued concepts at the same time, was intertwined with art for a long time. Therefore, starting with Egyptians and concluding with a modern influencer, people all over the world tend to think and sort different shades of beauty.
However, over the years, cultural expectations of beauty have been altered in a ratio with cultural, social, and economic transformation. In regard to this exploration, it adopted a design approach to analyze why and how we arrived to have different beauty standards regarding the change of values and art movements around the globe and in world history.
Evolution of Beauty Standards
As the phenomenon, unparalleled in its significance and ambiguous in its mandates, beauty was always an object of people’s regard and artwork. Bright colors and thin lines for women; sexually ambiguous men with lean muscles: Realizing European standards today requires more than simple searching or aiming beyond European standards today.
Greek appreciation of beauty is manifested in their architecture and sculpture, but this went hand in hand with health and therefore the kohl eyeliner and the hairstyle in ancient Egypt. During the Renaissance, beauty became more to be called “renewed” or “rebor and it became more specific and perfect. In the era of Victoria’s, a thin, sophisticated woman always having pale skin was the ultimate emblem of beauty.
The shift in beauty standards occurred at a faster pace, especially in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, perhaps by reason of emergent inventions like the mass media and advertising. consumerism, and the rest. There is a particular thin, which is the sexual thin, which has been magnified in the 50s and 60s and quite recently in the 90s as the heroin thin. In the modern world, erogenous societal norms are present; the ideal is curviness, diversity focusing on the portrayal of freedom.
It means that, as we move further, we, as a society, will learn new ways of defining beauty. Of course, the quest for beauty is as old as humanity itself; however, the criteria defining it are as malleable as the societies and the technologies that define the present-day world.
