Have you ever wondered that in your own country you might be considered a bit of an ugly duckling,
but get on a plane for a few hours and you can arrive at a new destination a veritable
Adonis or Aphrodite?
That might be a stretch of the imagination, but indeed ideas of beauty have changed somewhat
throughout the centuries and are not always compatible from country to country.
For years science has struggled with the idea of universal beauty, and while features that
signify health and vitality seem to always be popular, the ideal body and face does indeed
change all over the world.
Let’s start with skin, and the tone of our skin.
Many of you might not know that while in some countries people would literally almost die
to have a tan on their skin, in other places right now girls and boys, men and women, are
going to extremes to whiten their skin.
This is big in many parts of Asia, some parts of Africa and the Middle East.
Visit some countries and you will see people wearing gloves and face masks in the boiling
son, all because they don’t want our wonderful power-provider in the sky to darken the hue
of their skin.
Let us again stress, in some countries this is the norm, not some kind of unusual affliction.
And we are talking about whitening everything, from the face, to the armpits, to the nipples,
to the bottom, as well as male and female genitals.
What!?
We hear you exclaim, why would those crazy folks want to bleach their nether regions,
never mind their beautiful brown face.
We’re afraid that it’s a very long story, but you should take note that bleaching the
face white was very common among European nobility, including Kings and Queens of England.
During the 16th, 17th, 18th centuries people would go to extremes to lighten their skin,
sometimes using arsenic and other chemicals that could damage the skin or even kill someone.
Yep, people might die to be beautiful, and even today there are thousands of cases of
people being injured using dubious whitening creams.
But why?
As one expert tells us about the idea of European beauty in the past, “The ideology of white
supremacy that European colonists brought included the association of blackness with
primitiveness, lack of civilization, unrestrained sexuality, pollution, and dirt.”
People who worked the fields didn’t usually have such pallor, they were under the sun
all day.
It was a class thing for the most part, and being white was correlated with being a higher
class of citizen.
In some part of the world today, being white means you are not working in the fields, selling
snacks in the street, riding motorcycle taxis, but you are somehow above, maybe having the
cash to stay at home or are earning big money working in an office.
Even now, though often unspoken, people in some parts of the world relate dark skin to
peasantry.
We should add that people, companies, don’t outright say that, but whitening product commercials
have been heavily criticized for implying that.
Some westerners scoff at this, laughing at whitening armpit cream sold in 7-Eleven, and
then they find a beautiful tropical beach and stay under the sun all day getting a terrible
sunburn and improving their chances of future skin cancer.
Back home they might sit under sunbeds, just so they don’t look like one of the folks
that never gets to travel to wonderful beaches in Asia and the Caribbean.
Yep, they are also manipulated and under the spell of traditional ideas of beauty and the
underscoring of class snobbery.
The tan, say some experts, began to become more popular in western nations when international
travel became more accessible.
I have money, I will travel, come back, and you know I’ve been somewhere you can’t
afford.
Also, when Europe became less agrarian and more industrial, it was the working class
people working in factories all day not getting any sun on their skin.
The pale people then became the peasants, not the tanned people.
That’s part of it, anyway.
So, to all you milk-pale people in the UK, get yourself over to China where your pallor
is a la mode.
Actually the UK, where the white skin craze was kinda kicked off by Queen Elizabeth I
and where the sun shines at about the same rate as the Earth quakes, is said to be the
Fake Tan capital of the world.
And you bronze beauties, just know people are willing to risk terminal illness to have
your skin.
Yep, we are all beautiful in some ways.
Ok, enough of skin.
What about size?
Do you remember when supermodels began to get so thin it became a matter of public awareness?
When did Sandro Botticelli’s shapely Venus become too overweight?
Since when did the grisly, tough guy stop being attractive and man-bunned guys started
starving themselves for the perfect 26-inch waist?
Skinny has taken over?
Or has it?
This one is difficult to explain, but as the BBC reported in some countries the thin, very
feminine man is very attractive.
To many westerners those male Korean pop models that makes the girls go crazy might just look
like…er…girls.
Femininity in a man can be attractive in many parts of Asia, so don’t worry guys if you
lack that tough look.
The BBC has called this “soft masculinity” and in countries such as China, Japan, South
Korea and Thailand these rather feminine-looking men are very attractive.
Just check out the celeb magazines.
But we are told even in western nations such pretty boys are now the popular choice over
the rough-looking guys of the 80s and 90s.
The Telegraph writes, “Millennial men have gone soft.”
Meanwhile, being very masculine has become intertwined with toxicity.
Studies do show though, at least some studies, that western men are indeed becoming more
feminine.
After all, they look after the kids more, cook more, fix the car less, hunt less, fight
less.
But get this, you guys with thick jaws and strong gnarly hands, recent studies suggest
that women in poorer countries prefer you.
A University of Aberdeen study told us this was because women perceive them as having
better genetic health, and that’s important when life is tough.
So, you large-fisted, fishing-loving, car-fixing, hot-headed, iron-pumping, men of steel, head
over to a developing nation where the women think they need you.
Your time is wasted waiting in Starbucks for a damsel in distress.
Perhaps when life is easier, men just lose their grizzly look and sign-up for the man-bun.
The jury is still out and we don’t want to generalize too much.
We can say that overt masculinity has perhaps become less of an attractive thing, but it
seems not everywhere.
As for fatness, we are told there are still a few countries in the world where a chunky
lady is preferred from a woman with an hour-glass figure or that has a waist she has designed
through years of strict dieting and exercise.
Well-rounded women are said by some sources to be preferred in places such as Samoa and
Jamaica and Kuwait, while fatness was attractive in many more places not that long ago because
it was related to prosperity.
The New York Times writes that plumpness has seen a rise and fall in India over the recent
decades, and while an obese woman in the past might have been preferred, now the newspaper
says it’s more likely to be correlated with being slovenly.
The BBC tells us that places where malnourishment is widespread, there might be people believing
big is beautiful.
We might also look at the USA, where having a big booty isn’t a bad thing.
The Kardashian backside is certainly not attractive everywhere, while some people in America today
still prefer bigger lips and oversized, augmented mammilla.
According to some sources, that used adult video site data in their research, it seems
the USA likes big chested women and large behinds, while those bouncy booties for some
reason are a lot more popular in countries in the southern hemisphere besides Australasia
and parts of South Asia.
Let’s now look at the ears, nose, mouth and eyes.
It’s hard to find a place where there is a standard of ear beauty.
You can check out forums where worried people ask about their ears, and it seems to be generally
acceptable that big or small isn’t so bad, but some people don’t like their ears if
they stick out too much.
On the whole, though, people pay much less attention to ears than they do to the eyes,
nose and mouth.
In the West it’s written that for a long time a smaller nose has been more attractive
than a big honker.
Psychology Today tells us that the less prominent your nose is in the West, the better.
Your nose needs to be discreet, the article said.
That’s the reason why quite a few westerners go in for a nose job, aka, Rhinoplasty.
But did you know, no nose is too large in some countries.
You can find nations where people generally have a snub nose, especially some Asian countries,
and people spend more money than they can afford on making their nose bigger – sometimes
to the extent it’s really obvious it’s been built-up.
Thailand’s clinics are full to the brim with people, mainly women, getting nose jobs.
They might pay less and go to some roadside clinic, and according to the BBC they might
receive a botch job or may even die.
All over Asia, extending that bridge is not usual.
CNN writes that it’s just another fad linked to people trying to look more Caucasian.
And then we come to eyes, and again many Asians will have them “done”.
That means making them bigger and making the eyelids double over (blepharoplasty) more
like Caucasian people.
This gives an extra fold of skin.
In the West a popular surgery is to remove excess folds of skin, but that’s usually
down to ageing.
The eyes can also be made to look wider (epicanthoplasty), common in Asia.
In the West it seems people don’t go in for making their eyes smaller, except for
when they have a medical condition that makes them bug-eyed.
We might add that a fad picking up speed in parts of Asia is making the face V-Shaped,
which means shaving down a squarish jaw and making it pointier at the chin.
Asian female net idols, if you are inclined to follow them, sometimes have oversized eyes,
an aquiline nose and a chiseled chin.
People sometimes don’t even mind if the surgery looks obvious, because getting surgery
means you have money and so are of a higher status.
Most agree, it’s to try and look more Caucasian.
On that rationale, if you are Caucasian and don’t feel beautiful maybe head to Asia,
or parts of Asia.
Over in the USA, Women’s Health magazine reported in 2015 that some women were going
to extraordinary lengths to make their lips fuller – sometimes extremely full.
One doctor in that article said, “Lip augmentation is certainly not going away, but whether it's
increasing varies from practice to practice.”
He also said women going for huge lips, or “fish-lips” was becoming less common.
Then in 2017, reports told us lip reduction was in vogue in the US, a trend that has been
around in Asia for quite some time.
It’s complicated, but some sources say some Asian women want smaller mouths and thinner
lips to look more Caucasian and some western women want fuller lips to look more sensual.
So, while some people are getting their proboscis shrunk others are having permanent scaffold
erected.
Some of us die for a tan and some of us are willing to bleach our private parts just for
those occasions someone might stumble upon them.
Over there they prefer buxom, and over here they prefer slim.
Sometimes we want what we just don’t have, and often unconsciously we are following modes
of fashion related to status and class.
But as we said at the start, at least we all have a feature that is attractive somewhere.
Of course we had to generalize a bit today, and citizens of countries will have their
own idea of beauty.
But there is certainly some truth in what we have said.
What we’d like to know is how you feel about this, and maybe tell us what your standards
of beauty are.
If you liked this video, I suggest watching I slept for 3 hours for a week and this is
what happened.
Thanks for watching, and as always, don’t forget to like, share and subscribe.
See you next time.