Beauty Standards and Mental Health
Sandy Nguyen
As Asian Americans, most of us can relate to how our family always makes comments about our appearances. We hear everything from “no one’s going to marry you if you’re too fat!” to “you need to stop going outside, you’re too dark!” The majority of people who criticized my body growing up were the women in my family. After I gained weight due to health problems(going from 90 pounds to 120 pounds) I faced endless comments from family about the amount of cellulite I now had, my stomach rolls, how my clothes didn’t fit the same, how my face shape changed, how I looked more tired, bloated, and how I needed to focus on exercising more.
Despite Asian women coming in many shapes, sizes, and skin tones, there’s still this expectation that you have to be thin, feminine, pale, and doll-like. I still have family members who see “fat” as a bad word and think that 120 pounds is fat for a woman. To me, these behaviors have always been toxic, and the familial and societal pressures to look attractive and “healthy” 24/7 is damaging to our community’s health.
Just because something is a cultural norm, does not make it okay. Being bicultural, Asian American women are inundated with messages from both the Asian community and the American community that they must look a certain way. We are held to impossible standards and the patriarchy teaches us that we must always look desirable to men. This look is almost always light skin, blonde hair, blue eyes, petite, thigh gaps, wispy eyebrows, thin lips, no blemishes or wrinkles, and thin noses.
Essentially, features that are often associated with white Europeans.
And in Asian cultures, we often see similar beauty standards with an emphasis on the need to appear youthful, have fair skin, thin noses, slim figures, a v-shaped jaw, straight eyebrows, and larger eyes.
While there are many layers to this issue -when we look at this from a colonial lens - we can learn about how colonialism and white supremacy plays a role in the beauty standards imposed on us. As stated by Nell Irvin Painter, historian and author of The History of White People, “Racial theorists such as Christoph Meiners and Johann Blumenbach defined the category of ‘white,’ or ‘Caucasian,’ as being the most beautiful of the races. It was important for [them] to be superior in all areas.” The group of academics who first created these racial categories were white supremacists, so they wanted the people they called “their women” to be the most beautiful and “their men” to be the most virile.
Colonial mentality, the form of internalized oppression that conditions colonized people to believe that their ethnic or cultural identity is inferior to Western culture or whiteness, reinforces this.
As a whole, women of color have been taught and forced to reject their features and adopt these Eurocentric beauty standards for centuries.
In tandem, we see how Asian cultures also push similar standards, internalize them, profit off of them, and normalize them, creating an environment where Asian women feel pressured to tie their physical features to their value and worth as individuals. How many Asian and Asian American women have tried to use makeup or drugstore tools to get double eyelids? How many have gone to get double eyelid surgery, rhinoplasty, or other cosmetic procedures, or signed up for “life-changing”, “fast-acting” dieting pills? In many Asian cultures where weight is often criticized, many Asian American women also have a complicated relationship with food or dress a certain way to hide body fat. Additionally, because of this cultural emphasis on having fair skin, darker-skinned Asian American women may use skin lightening products and light-skinned Asian women avoid getting tans. These messages that we constantly receive from our family members create body image and self-esteem issues among Asian American women.
We know that endless messages from our cultures, media, social circles, and the beauty industry tell us that if we don’t look “perfect”- or in other words, look white - then we’re not valuable or attractive. These messages can cut so deep that many young women who face these challenges are also at risk for developing serious mental health issues such as body dysmorphic disorder, disordered eating, and anxiety/depression, and are likely to engage in self-harm.
Research shows that Asian American women demonstrate higher rates of disordered eating than other women of color with comparable rates to European American women.
Pressures for thinness and thin-ideal internalization are predictive of disordered eating in Asian American women. Though eating disorder rates are alarmingly high, studies have shown that Asian American women find it especially difficult to seek treatment. In a 2015 study from California State Fullerton, researchers found that among Asian American women with the average age of 25, most believed their symptoms were “not severe enough to seek treatment”. Another reason why many Asian American women do not seek treatment for eating disorders is the lack of representation regarding Asian American health issues in media and entertainment, with the typical representation of a character with an eating disorder being white. Additionally, by only treating and portraying Asian Americans as the “model minority,” it makes it extremely difficult for Asian Americans to relate to social norms, thereby making it less likely for them to believe that disordered eating is serious enough to seek treatment for, highlighting a larger cultural issue in the community. Asian American women also face the fear and shame that comes with the stigmatization of therapy--moreover, clinicians may have difficulty recognizing eating disorder symptoms if they are not culturally competent, so Asian Americans are often misdiagnosed or under-diagnosed.
Healing from mainstream beauty standards is often healing from white supremacy and a radical act of self-love! While it may be a long and difficult process, there are many ways we can work to decolonize and reject beauty standards and divest from Eurocentric messages. Remember that we didn’t create this problem, but we do have the power to unlearn it.
Seek professional resources.
Honor what was passed down to you by generations of women before you.
Find community care, solidarity, and connection with others who embrace their non-white, non-Eurocentric features unapologetically.
Practice more self-compassion.
Don’t shrink yourself! Take up space, physically and mentally.
Look at yourself in the mirror and repeat affirmations out loud.
Change your feed.
Avoid shaming and fixating on your weight.
Understand that capitalism and insecurities operate on a symbiotic relationship and we should reject that.
Learn to care for your body in ways that don’t aim to seek approval from white audiences.
Expand, reclaim, and redefine what beauty means to you.
Embrace your authentic self.
See yourself as the norm.
Sources
Is Beauty In The Eyes Of The Colonizer? - NPR Code Switch
When Will The World Finally Accept and Embrace Ethnic Noses? - Hip Latina
4 Ways Colonial Mentality Taught Me To Hate Myself And How I Fight Against It Every Day - Everyday Feminism
10 Ways the Beauty Industry Tells You Being Beautiful Means Being White - The Body is Not an Apology
Here’s Why Asian Americans Are Three Times Less Likely to Seek Treatment for Eating Disorders - Generasian
Disordered Eating in Asian American Women: Sociocultural and Culture-Specific Predictors - L.M. Akoury, C.S. Warren, and K.M. Culbert
Asian Eyes: Body Image and Eating Disorders of Asian and Asian American Women - C.C. Iijima Hall
Eating Disorders and the API Community - Center for Discovery