Beauty and Race

Last reviewed: February 2017

Abstract

The concept of beauty has been discussed by countless philosophers and artists, but the word is most commonly linked to pleasing physical appearance, particularly in females. Western nations who have largely adopted European standards of beauty in women have been dominant and continue to be so even in what some have labeled a post-racist society. The result has been internalized racism that has often created dissatisfaction and shame in non-white groups. Beauty and race intersect in individual psyches and in society. Women of all races continue to compare themselves to an unattainable ideal.

Overview

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) definition of beauty specifies that the quality is especially feminine and that the perception of physical attractiveness includes facial features, skin color, and body. It can be argued that the OED, that most prestigious historical dictionary of the English language, implicitly recognizes that “beauty” is a gendered, racialized word. Research suggests that at least by the age of three months, babies demonstrate preferences based on attractive facial features, gender, and race, and by the age of three or four, children show observable biases based on these factors. From an early age, girls describe people in terms of appearance more frequently than do boys. Through such channels as peer and family interactions, television programming and commercials, and fairy tales, children receive cultural reinforcement concerning the value attached particularly to attractiveness in females (Rennels & Langlois, 2014).

Frevert (2014) notes that research supports the idea of a cross-cultural image of beauty that includes big eyes, pronounced cheekbones, and a wide smile. Observation of the media that define beauty in contemporary culture reveals that the predominant image of beauty in European and American culture has been white. The idea that Eurocentric features and light skin are necessary for beauty is rooted in slavery and colonialism, and airbrushed images that celebrate beauty in this mythologized form are ubiquitous in twenty-first century American culture. Thinness too is part of the beauty image.

Countless studies show that body image dissatisfaction is linked to self-esteem and its lack. Some research suggests that African American women typically have more positive body images than do Caucasian and Hispanic women, but “colorism,” the idea that lighter skin color is more aesthetically pleasing, is also part of body image. Research suggests that its effects on self-esteem can be strong for some African American women (Wallace, Townsend, Glasgow & Ojie, 2011). Skin color defines beauty in cultures other than African American. L. Ayu Saraswati (2013) traces Indonesia’s linking of light skin color to beauty to a variety of influences ranging from India before the tenth century to the period of Dutch colonialism to the twenty-first century and the popularity of American culture.

Women of all races are affected by this narrow, Westernized definition of beauty. According to Beauty at Any Cost: A YWCA Report on the Consequences of America’s Beauty Obsession on

Women and Girls, released in 2008, 80 percent of American women were dissatisfied with their appearance. The same report revealed that women spent $7 billion on cosmetics in 2007 and another $11.7 million on cosmetic surgeries (chiefly breast augmentation and liposuction) and nonsurgical procedures (such as Botox injections). More than 90 percent of surgical procedures were performed on women; African American, Hispanic American, and Asian American women accounted for almost one-fourth of the procedures.

Beauty at Any Cost reports that about 10 million women suffered from an eating disorder, and 67 percent of the rest were dieting, including 53 percent already at a healthy weight. Eating disorders are often assumed to be a problem only for white, upper middle-class women and girls, but research indicates that eating disorders also affect African Americans, Latinas, Asians, and Native Americans (González, 2004; Walcott, Pratt & Patel, 2003). Anorexia remains primarily a disorder diagnosed among whites, but bulimia and binge-eating have been increasingly diagnosed in other populations. Adolescents are particularly vulnerable. Researchers note that as youth adopt Western perceptions of beauty, their attachment to their ethnic identity diminishes, and their desire for the unrealistic slenderness that is part of the American ideal places adolescents of color at higher risk for eating disorders (Walcott et al., 2003).

According to the Dove Global Beauty and Confidence Report (2016), which surveyed women in thirteen countries, 69 percent of women and 65 percent of girls blame the unrealistic concept of beauty disseminated by advertising and media for their appearance anxiety, and even higher percentages (71 percent and 67 percent) call for media images that present greater diversity in physical appearance, age, race, shape, and size. Even after three decades of critics calling for more diversity in American advertising, 91 percent of U.S. models were white. The idea of beauty reflected in images of white women is not limited to the United States. For example, models who appear in advertisements in countries such as Singapore and Taiwan were also predominantly white.

Further Insights

Ironically, perhaps nothing affirms the dominance of whiteness and thinness as the accepted standards for ideal beauty more than the attention directed at efforts to define beauty more diversely. Two of the best-known examples of media diversity strategies that attracted extensive media attention are Dove’s long-running Real Beauty campaign and Vogue magazine’s black issue.

In 2004, Edelman, public relations firm for Dove, conducted a marketing research study that found only 2 percent of women in their global sample thought of themselves as beautiful. The result was Dove’s Real Beauty campaign. Race was only one part of diversity in the Dove campaign. For example, Little Girls (2006), a Super Bowl XL commercial, opens with clips of sad-faced young girls with statements such as “wishes she were blonde” superimposed on the screen and closes with smiling images and the sound of girl’s voices singing lines from Cindi Lauper’s “True Colors,” accompanied by a text that says “Let’s change their minds.” In 2011 Dove’s “Campaign for Real Beauty” morphed into Dove’s “Movement for Self-Esteem,” but, as the Choose Beautiful campaign (2015) and the #MyBeautyMySay campaign (2016) indicate, the concept of beauty remains central.

Ad Age chose the Campaign for Real Beauty as the top advertising campaign of the twenty-first century, deeming it the most unforgettable and groundbreaking and crediting it with attempting to change society’s ideas about beauty. Some critics have been less impressed, charging that the ads are hypocritical given that the photographs used employ some of the same doctoring techniques the ads attack and that Dove’s parent company Unilever also sells Slimfast, a food supplement marketed for weight loss; Fair & Lovely, a skin lightening product sold primarily to Asian women; and Axe, a brand of men’s grooming products that targets young men through a series of ads that have widely been termed misogynistic.

High fashion is a frequent target of criticism for purveying unattainable and unhealthy body images and perpetuating racial and ethnic stereotypes. As the global trendsetter in the field, Vogue has established the standard for models’ looks (Kuipers, Chow & van der Laan, 2014). In July 2008, Vogue Italia published an all black issue. Four covers featured English models Naomi Campbell and Jourdan Dunn, American Sessilee Lopez, and Ethiopian-born Liya Kebede.

Italian Vogue editor Franca Sozzani said she was inspired by Barack Obama’s campaign that called for change. Renowned American fashion photographer Stephen Meisel said that he had long been concerned about the lack of diversity on runways and welcomed the opportunity to use models like Veronica Webb, Tyra Banks, Alek Wek, Toccara Jones, the plus-size model from America’s Next Top Model, and others in the Vogue shoot (Kuipers et al, 2014).

The issue sold well in Italy; in both the United Kingdom and the United States, it sold out in the first 72 hours. Publisher Condé Nast reprinted and distributed 40,000 additional copies. Much of the press coverage, particularly in the United States, was positive, praising the issue as a breakthrough. However, others noted that the models were tall and most were thin. Except for Sudanese-British supermodel Alek Wek, the models’ features were more typical of European connections than of African ancestry. Others noted that the focus on blackness rendered the predominance of white models in the ads all the more obvious (Kuipers et al., 2014).

Two months after Vogue Italia’s black issue, Vogue China released an oriental beauty issue featuring Chinese designers, largely unknown Chinese models, and accomplished women of Chinese ancestry from other parts of the globe. Like Vogue Italia’s black issue, the oriental beauty issue extended the image of beauty beyond the conventional Western concept, but unlike the black issue, the Chinese issue did not target a global audience. The black issue provoked a frenzy of response in print and online; the oriental beauty issue received little attention from international media (Kuipers et al., 2014).

The Dove campaign and Vogue’s black issue undoubtedly led some to question the prevailing, narrow, racialized definition of beauty. The lasting effects of the two efforts, however, are open to question. In 1974, Beverly Johnson was the first black model to appear on the cover of American Vogue, and Naomi Campbell in 1989 was the first to win the coveted September cover. It was more than twenty years before another black woman, actress Halle Berry in 2010, graced a September cover and five years more before another September issue featured a black woman, superstar Beyoncé. Slightly over a fourth of the magazine’s covers in 2015 feature blacks. Singer Rihanna and actress Lupita Nyong'o were given solo covers; Kanye West with reality star wife Kim Kardashian was on the April cover, and Joan Smalls appeared on the September cover with fellow models Cara Delevingne and Karlie Kloss. It should be noted that except for Smalls, the black covers went to celebrities rather than professional models.

Online fashion industry forum The Fashion Spot noted in their October 2016 Diversity Report that of the models walking in fashion weeks in New York, London, Milan, and Paris, 25.4 percent were women of color: 10.33 percent black, 7 percent Asian, 3.36 percent Latina, .4 percent Middle Eastern, and 4.27 percent defined as “other.” Moves such as People’s naming Lupita Nyong’o the Most Beautiful Person in the World in 2014 (following Beyoncé in 2012 and Jennifer Lopez in 2011) are significant, but they remain exceptions to the dominant image of beauty represented as fair and fleshless.

Issues

S. H. Camp (2015) reminds her readers that early modern European travelers found beauty in African men and women. Often the same writers who described Africans as savage also commented on their appealing appearance. They also noted different skin tones among African groups, recognizing the different cultures and different physical appearances among the groups. Camp locates the perception of blacks as ugly and inferior within the contexts of slavery in the Americas, a period when white supremacists equated beauty with European color and features and defined blacks in opposition to that standard as an ugly, inferior race. The view persisted long after emancipation.

The effect of this view on the self-perception of African Americans was most famously demonstrated by the “doll tests” (1939) conducted by African American social psychologists Kenneth B. Clark and Mamie K. Phipps Clark, who were interested in examining how race consciousness affected self-consciousness. The Clarks presented African American children between the ages of six and nine with two dolls identical except for color: one was white and one was black. The children were asked to indicate such things as the doll they preferred to play with, the “nice” doll, the “bad” doll, and finally the doll that looked most like them.

In large numbers, children in both the North and South saw the white doll as pretty and “nice” and the black doll as ugly and “bad.” Some cried or ran away to avoid answering the final question. The Browns and others replicated the study into the 1950s. One study concluded that African American children attending segregated schools were more likely to choose the white doll as the “nice” one (Camp, 2015). The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) used the Clarks’ research to argue against school segregation in the 1954 Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education.

In 2009 after the election of President Barack Obama, ABC’s Good Morning America conducted a small-scale version of the test: more than half of the children selected the black doll as looking most like them. However, when asked which doll was pretty, there was a marked gender difference in the children’s responses. Most of the boys said both were pretty, but almost half of girls selected the white doll as the pretty one.

The problem the Clarks documented had deep roots. The black pride cultural movement of the 1960s and 1970s embraced natural hairstyles, true skin tones, and ethnic clothing. “Black is beautiful” was a triumphant cry of the movement. A version of that cry can be found in black beauty contests. As early as 1891, a black newspaper sponsored a search for the most beautiful black women in America, implicitly asserting that black was beautiful. In 1914, another black newspaper, the New York Age, launched another beauty contest, declaring that “the most beautiful women in the world are those of the Negro race” and expressing the hope that the winners of the contest would prove that fact (Craig, 2002).

Three weeks into the contest, a reader’s letter expressed the hope that the contest would celebrate an ideal representative of black beauty (an “Egyptian” type). Craig argues that in accepting the reader’s preference for an “Egyptian” beauty, the Age confirmed that straight hair and light skin were prerequisites for beauty and evoked the mulatto as the ideal beauty. The fifteen winners were all light-skinned women. A letter from another reader, however, criticized the selection as not representative of the race and deplored that images of the light-skinned beauties would be models to which little black girls would aspire.

In 1970, in her first novel, The Bluest Eye, future Nobel laureate Toni Morrison made explicit in the character of an abused young black girl longing for blue eyes the internalized racism disguised by race pride in the Age’s contest and revealed in the Clarks’ doll tests. Morrison’s narrator calls physical beauty in such contexts destructive. In Ain’t I a Beauty, Craig insists that a transformation of American ideas about beauty and race is required for the United States to dismantle the racism that distorts definitions of the beautiful.

Terms & Concepts

Diversity: Difference or unlikeness, in its broadest sense. As a social/political term, diversity refers not only to acceptance and respect for differences, which may be based on race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, age, size, religion, or other factors, but also to fair representation of a diverse population.

Eating Disorder: Serious condition involving eating behaviors damaging to one’s health; most commonly includes anorexia nervosa (pathological fear of weight gain leading to malnutrition, dangerous weight loss, and distorted body image), bulimia (cycle of compulsive overeating followed by purging), and binge-eating disorder (recurring episodes of consuming large amounts of food beyond the point of satiation).

Internalized Racism: The acceptance, generally subconscious, by a minority race of the concepts, stereotypes, and attitudes of the culturally dominant race.

Media: The means through which data, including news, entertainment, and advertising, are disseminated to an audience; once referred primarily to print media such as newspapers and magazines but now includes television, electronic media.

Photoshopped: Taken from the name of Adobe’s trademarked software suite for digitally editing photographs; refers in a general sense to images that have been altered using Adobe’s Photoshop or similar software. Media images are routinely altered to make women appear younger and thinner and also to mold, smooth, and color facial features.

Race: An extremely dubious term used to categorize people by inherited characteristics such as skin color, hair texture, and bone structure that are common to people with ancestral origins in particular geographical locations; distinct from ethnicity, which is based on culture.

Bibliography

Camp, S. H. (2015). Black is beautiful: An American history. Journal of Southern History, 81(3), 675–690.

Craig, M. L. (2002). Ain’t I a beauty queen?: Black women, beauty, and the politics of race. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Frevert, T. K., & Walker, L. S. (2014). Physical attractiveness and social status. Sociology Compass, 8(3), 313–323. Retrieved September 27, 2016 from EBSCO Online Database Sociology Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sxi&AN=94955956&site=ehost-live

González, G. (2004). ¿You can never be too rich or too thin? (or too white): Beauty and body image for African American and Chicana/Latinas. Conference Papers—American Sociological Association, 1–16. Retrieved September 30, 2016 from EBSCO Online Database Sociology Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sxi&AN=15930903&site=ehost-live

Jarrin, A. (2015). Towards a biopolitics of beauty: Eugenics, aesthetic hierarchies and plastic surgery in Brazil. Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 24(4), 535–552. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Sociology Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sxi&AN=112082872&site=ehost-live

King-O’Riain, R. C. (2006). Pure beauty: Judging race in Japanese American beauty pageants. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Kuipers, G., Chow, Y. F., & van der Laan, E. (2014). Vogue and the possibility of cosmopolitics: Race, health and cosmopolitan engagement in the global beauty industry. Ethnic & Racial Studies, 37(12), 2158–2175. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Sociology Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sxi&AN=98053597&site=ehost-live

Rennels, J. L., & Langlois, J. H. (2014). Children’s attractiveness, gender, and race biases: A comparison of their strength and generality. Child Development, 85(4), 1401–1418. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Sociology Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sxi&AN=97053922&site=ehost-live

Saraswati, L. A. (2013). Seeing beauty, sensing race in transnational Indonesia. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press.

Walcott, D., Pratt, H. D., & Patel, D. R. (2003). Adolescents and eating disorders: Gender, racial, ethnic, sociocultural, and socioeconomic issues. Journal of Adolescent Research18, 223–242.

Wallace, S. A., Townsend, T. G., Glasgow, Y. M., & Ojie, M. J. (2011). Gold diggers, video vixens, and Jezebels: Stereotype images and substance use among urban African American girls. Journal of Women’s Health, 20(9), 1315–1324. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Sociology Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sxi&AN=65301523&site=ehost-live

Suggested Reading

Bailey, E. J. (2008). Black America, body beautiful. How the African American image is changing fashion fitness, and other industries. Westport, CT: Praeger.

Gimlin, D. (2015). The managed hand: Race, gender, and the body in beauty service work. Social Forces, 93(4), 1–3. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Sociology Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sxi&AN=103104499&site=ehost-live

Lopez, M. N. (2016). A blackanese beauty queen. Contexts: Understanding People in Their Social Worlds, 15(1), 73–75. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Sociology Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sxi&AN=113947280&site=ehost-live

Nelson, C. K. (2013). Unbinding an audience and a speech: Dove’s answer to the beauty/ authenticity double bind. Qualitative Research Reports in Communication, 14(1), 112–118.

Poran, M. A. (2002). Denying diversity: Perceptions of beauty and social comparison processes among Latina, black, and white women. Sex Roles, 47(1–2), 65–81. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Sociology Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sxi&AN=8569622&site=ehost-live

Thompson, B. (2013). Way before the word: Queer organizing and race when beauty still counts. Feminist Studies, 39(2), 526–548. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Sociology Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sxi&AN=91978343&site=ehost-live

White, C., Oliffe, J. L., & Bottorff, J. L. (2013). Masculinity, race, and style in the consumption of cigarettes, 1962–1972. American Journal of Public Health, 103(4), e44–e55. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Sociology Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sxi&AN=85586481&site=ehost-live