Beauty Does Not Mean White

Combine this with the strong message that our value depends on our attractiveness and the toxic notion that only white women are beautiful (it's my skin color that's wrong, not a limited selection of primary colors) and you can understand the damage that the beauty industry is doing to women of color.

It is not the skin color that we call attractive, but the eyes, hair, and nose that occur in Latin American, Asian, black, and native women. These examples show how the beauty industry says beauty means whiteness and that beauty is all that matters. We learn that what is called attractive is the eye, the hair, the nose and everything else that occurs in these groups of women.

A manifestation of white supremacy is the use of white as a measure of beauty. The following ten examples show what the beauty industry says about what beauty means and why it matters.

Non-white people can, of course, be considered beautiful as long as they look like white people. Blackness is not beautiful because white people find it attractive, fetishize it and present it as an attraction. It's nice compared to the standards and assurances of the corporations, and that's all that matters.

Black people are not ugly because whites are not the defining measure of what beauty means. The only way to develop an understanding of what is beautiful, except in terms of aesthetics, is to broaden our understanding and move away from the "beautiful white" standard.

Eurocentric culture does not dictate what is beautiful. The world still clings to prejudices that define attractiveness and beauty as white, but those who reject these standards and refuse to participate can set new rules.

The current model of French beauty requires women who do not abide by it to seek other forms and expressions of physicality that are ignored and devalued.

It is undeniable that many of the current beauty standards in the US are based on a certain kind of beauty that revolves around a kind of white femininity that is accessible only to a select few. For starters, many current Western beauty standards celebrate whites not as an objective biological or evolutionary thing, but as a white person. If you look at the work of early race theorists like Christoph Meiner and Johann Blumenbach, they define categories like "white" and "Caucasian" as the most beautiful breeds.

It was only until the 1940s that the rules changed to allow women of color to compete in the Miss America pageant. For some reason, many people think of American beauty as a thin blonde, blue-eyed white woman.

Many people talk about how important it is to buy make-up, fashion and design for women of color. People in the industry assume that creating an image of beauty means working for white women.

The absence of women of color in the image of beauty is even more disturbing when you think that the industry is promoting them, and that includes telling us we should have lighter skin. Photo by photo, the standard of what beauty looks like to us tells us that beauty is unattainable and that we will never be white. One of the ways colorism is shown in the industry is to tell women of color that darkness is the reason they are ugly because they are.

The idealized beauty of Renaissance painting was alabaster shaved and the presence of people of color in medieval and Renaissance art could not be ignored. It became clear that calling their women "fair" associated with their skin with the word "fair", gave their skin color moral legitimacy and dismissed the validity of dark-skinned women. What became beautiful in the realm of the fair were the fair-skinned.

Over the years, many beautiful women have been portrayed as white women, putting them at the center of hair and skin care and makeup commercials. Restricting the portrayal of beautiful black and multicultural women is a reminder of the falsehood that only fair-skinned women deserve credit.

Moreover, Euro-American beauty standards set African-American women against prevailing cultural beauty standards. Adherence to these standards has had, and continues to have, a devastating effect on African-American women. The beauty industry has bowed to enormous pressure from black women who have changed their shopping habits, self-changing products, and self-worship of products.

Using Afro-centric theory as a standpoint and theory, this article examines the impact of white beauty standards on African-American women. The article sheds light on the meaning and effect of beauty, body image and hair and questions social definitions of beauty. The liberation of black beauty is a challenge to the prevailing cultural standard of beauty.

In the eyes of the viewer, technology has placed the power to define beauty in people's hands. Since the beginnings of women's magazines, beauty has been codified and commercialized. If a woman does not let her beauty be wasted, people say, her future depends on whom her husband marries.

Fashion and beauty magazines serve as huge advertisements for an industry that relies on selling beauty standards to women as willing customers. Seeing and being seen, they are presented as role models of aspiration that set cultural standards for the beauty of women.

These women represent an effortless, carefree femininity that includes a ruffled head, large eyes enlarged by a steady flick of black eyeliner, and an allure of undisturbed glamour captured in a simple, timeless wardrobe. The aesthetic that defines French beauty is out of reach for the average woman who is not born with the innate ability to wake up and look like a sleepy sex kitten. Women are beautiful, but their beauty is exclusive, meant to be replicated and impossible to duplicate.

The term "French beauty" functions as a classification code and refers to a type of aspiring, if not inspiring beauty that rejects women who do not fit in the mould of what women are supposed to be.

Beauty standards are the individual qualifications that are expected of women to embody the female ideal of beauty and to be successful. They are communicated to us via films, television, literature, magazines, school system, medical system, politics, personal relationships, social media, law and advertising. Western standards of beauty are a product of capitalist, colonialist, patriarchal, and white supremacist societies designed to make us consume and consume.