I Feel Pretty!: Teaching Our Daughters How to Navigate Society’s Beauty Fixation
by NoSorry Parent Lisa
The Beauty Industry’s Tactics
Raise your hand if you have ever bought a beauty product simply because smart advertising sent you running to the mirror for a close self-examination…and you found yourself lacking. Being a woman in our society is hard, no matter who you are or what you look like. Our society promotes a very narrow definition of what “beauty” is, and all women fall somewhere on a spectrum of just how close to or far away we are from that ideal. Rare is the woman who actually meets this standard, for the vast majority of women are automatically disqualified based on their body size, shape, type, color, and/or age. Alarmingly, some of the women who are the MOST critical of their own physical appearance are actually those who come the closest, technically, to society’s definition of beauty! They feel the microscope of the public gaze upon them, and so become hyper-focused on every single minor “flaw,” spending an inordinate amount of time and money in an endless pursuit to improve themselves.
The wild part is, if a woman is born naturally “beautiful,” according to the beauty industry, or if she has invested enough time and money into artificially creating that beauty, society then tends to turn its back on her. Rather than, or in addition to, admiring her hard-earned looks, that very same appearance then becomes “proof of her vanity, brainlessness, or the reason for (her) success.” We have all heard these criticisms: “Your coworker is so attractive, she must have slept her way to the top!” “Your neighbor looks so stylish, she must be an airhead.” “That woman is a 10, I’m not going to waste my time talking to her, because she must be completely full of herself.” The truth is, society does not want women to feel good about themselves. Our society thrives off of tearing women down, both for being unattractive as well as for being attractive. Meanwhile, the beauty industry is working overtime to squeeze every last dollar they can out of poking and prodding at our fragile egos.
Who Does This Benefit?
Keeping women focused on the beauty rat race only serves to benefit the patriarchy. The “relentless push for girls to meet an impossible standard of beauty lines the pockets of the beast by satisfying his appetite for gender stereotypes, racism and classism, all of which reinforce ideas of who matters.” The beauty industry was worth $579 billion globally as of 2023, and has continued to grow since then. The United States alone accounts for 20% of that revenue. Total revenue from surgical and nonsurgical cosmetic procedures in the United States was $14.6 billion. “On skin care alone, the average American woman spends $15,000 in her lifetime - enough for a down payment on a house - and is walking around with an average of eight dollar’s worth of products on her face.” There is absolutely incentive for the beauty industry to make women feel as badly about themselves as possible, and truly, there is no end to it. Have you ever seen a woman get only one surgical procedure and then declare herself fully satisfied with her body? Or have you watched as she has continued to find new “flaws” to pick at and grieve over? As our bodies get older, there are only more and more “flaws” to spend money on to fix. And why stop at charging women to “fix” fine lines and wrinkles once we have them etching their way into our skin, when the beauty industry can also wring money out of self-conscious young women, their faces smooth with youth, by promising them that they will age better if they spend their money fighting wrinkles even BEFORE they exist?!
There is no end, and there is no bottom, and even as women try to fight back against the negative messaging, the beauty industry has only gotten savvier in its approach. Women have been calling out the beauty industry for preying on women’s self-confidence by highlighting their flaws for generations, but the beauty industry has fought back in the messaging wars. Rather than highlighting flaws, their campaigns “in recent years have been wrapped in the language of wellness and self-empowerment.” As though looking like your natural self or aging naturally is a bad thing, the beauty industry would have you believe that spending money on their creams and serums, injections and surgeries, are all acts of ultimate self-care! As though the coloration of our under eye is related in any way whatsoever to our overall health and happiness! As though our natural aging bodies are in need of the beauty industry’s help. Indeed, this is nothing but a manipulative tactic to try to rope in more women into the endless chase for beauty.
The Sabotaging Effects of Beauty Fixation on Our Daughters
Spending time and energy solely on appearance sabotages our daughters’ abilities to succeed. For instance, “Teen girls spend 7.7 hours per week on their appearance, nearly double that of boys, who have permission to get on with their lives with a quick shower and comfy clothes.” This investment of time into their looks ends up hurting them in both the short and long run. While the girls are looking in the mirror and lamenting the shape of their eyebrows, their male counterparts have that same amount of time to invest in other things, like learning skills, doing homework, or spending time with friends. Boys have the opportunity to learn about their own interests during the time that girls are learning that what matters is their looks.
Girls’ hyper fixation on their appearance can distract from their ability to succeed. Instead of focusing on the project they are working on during class, for instance, a teenage girl very well may be focused on her bad hair day, and failing to complete her assignment because she is internally falling apart at the thought that her classmates might be judging her. Girls are acutely aware that people are watching and evaluating them. Studies show “girls are wary of pursuing leadership roles because of the harassment and discrimination they see women leaders endure. If girls shy away from leadership positions, then women in decision-making roles will continue to be a minority.” Why become a leader when it is only going to make you feel worse about yourself? Look at the intense and ongoing criticism Hillary Clinton received in her positions of power. What woman wants to be dissected in that way? How many female leaders have chosen to stay on the sidelines of powerful positions due to the fear of widespread criticism and rejection based on physical appearance? Boys do not experience the same ruminations in the same way, because society does not expect them to hold themselves to the same high standard of “beauty” in order to be considered desirable and acceptable.
How to Help Our Daughters Break Free
The relentless fixation of our society and ourselves on our own physical appearance has wreaked untold damage on our collective potential. But it is possible to break free from the messaging we are so regularly fed. It is possible to change our own mindsets from worrying about what we see in the mirror to who we are and what we can accomplish with our lives. The best thing we can do is to have a healthy model in an older female friend, mentor, or family member in the first place. My own mother is purposely aging naturally, without intervention, and she is doing it intentionally to give her daughters and granddaughters a healthy example of letting oneself grow older. In fact, “research shows a mother who frets about her weight or criticizes her appearance is more likely to have a daughter who says she dislikes her own body.” If negative body image can be contagious, then so can positive body image. If you yourself had a poor example of body positivity in your home, then perhaps you can make a concerted effort not to pass that on to your own daughters. Teach your daughters how to take good care of their bodies, because health is an important and worthy goal. Hygiene, exercise, good sleep, and a healthy diet are all positive messages that all women can benefit from, and they will set your daughters on a path of true self-care.
At the same time, it is important to avoid nitpicking, both of our own bodies and those of our daughters. Who cares if their clothes don’t quite match? If they genuinely don’t care, all the better for them! Who cares if we have a bad hair day, or if we do not have the same curves as the influencers on social media. If you model for your daughter that you live unburdened by these things, she will absorb that mentality from you. We are “shaping how our children see themselves, so if we drastically reduce commenting on how they look, it becomes less a part of the story they tell themselves.” And if they aren’t focusing on the story of how they look so much, then just think of the person they might let themselves become with the time and energy they can now reinvest!
It might be easy to give your daughter praise about how pretty she is or how nice she looks. And while there is certainly a time and a place for compliments like these, do not make them the bread and butter of what you point out and focus on with her, because you will be teaching her that these are things worth noticing and commenting on above all else. Instead, “praise attributes that will help build resilience such as handling frustration well or being a good friend. We can observe their wit, smarts, courage, imagination, or any of the other nonaesthetic qualities…so they can expect to be heard and respected, not eyeballed and appraised.” The less you make your daughter’s appearance the focus of your commentary, the less her appearance becomes the focus of her own internal monologue. If she learns body neutrality now, learning to shift her focus away from her physical appearance and more towards seeing her body as a vessel in which she gets to experience life and the world around her, she will be far more likely to be free of the continual pressures society will inevitably place upon her all her life. If she learns how to be a critical observer of what the beauty industry is up to, then she will be far more immune to its manipulative and debasing tactics.
Training Our Daughters…And Retraining Ourselves!
None of this is easy, because it comes down to retraining ourselves. It has been firmly implanted in us that we should look a certain way in order to be likeable and acceptable. Our identities, our self-esteem, and our self-worth can so easily become wrapped up in these things. The commentary by society at large on our bodies is endless, and we are fed the message that we are doing well when we give into it, by ourselves, by our friends and family, and by the world at large. But it is a double-edged sword. Even as friends might compliment your weight loss, they still might have a critical side comment about how you have lost TOO much weight. Even the friend who compliments your face lift might go home that night and roll her eyes at your pure vanity, or about how your skin still looks aged, as so forth. It is quite simply a rat race that never fully pays off. So much better to teach yourself and your daughters to focus your time, energy, and money on important things: your own financial security, once-in-a-lifetime experiences, spending time with your family, your education, your accomplishments, your health, your impact on the people around you, and your inherent sense of self-worth. You are as valuable as you will ever be simply by being and nurturing your natural self. No amount of side comments from the world at large, no amount of manipulation from a greedy beauty industry, can take that away from you!
Resources
All textual references in this blog are quoted from Jo-Ann Finklestein’s “Sexism and Sensibility: Raising Empowered, Resilient Girls in the Modern World.” I highly recommend this book for a deeper dive into the many issues surrounding raising girls to have high self-esteem in today’s society!