The Mycenaean

Our perception of beauty and what is beautiful changes with any person. Factors from age to race change how we see beauty in the world.

In a video by Jubilee Project, they brought in 50 people and asked them all one simple question: if you could change one thing about your body, what would it be?

Adults answered with their eyes, their skin, their ears, and more insecurities. Upon naming what they’d change, they started to explain why they hated that part of them. They backed it up with personal stories about people who made them hate parts of themselves.

One guy said he hated his large ears. He said kids made fun of him for that, calling him names such as dumbo. Another girl said she wished her eyes were bigger because everyone liked girls with big eyes.

However when they asked the same question to children, the responses were completely different. One girl wanted a mermaid tail, a little boy wanted a shark mouth so he could ‘eat a lot of stuff’. Another girl stated she didn’t want to change a thing about her body.

Society changes our perception of our bodies as we age, but it’s not just society. As we age, we see more flaws in ourselves.

Our thoughts on beauty are like when you repeatedly say a word. The longer you repeat a word, the weirder it sounds, just like the longer you look at your body, the weirder it looks. As people age, they get so used to seeing their body everyday that it just looks uglier.

The fact that most of the people in the video backed up what they would change with stories of people making fun of them is appalling. We have created a certain rubric for being pretty and if you stray from it, you’ll be ridiculed for it.

Not only as we grow older does our perspective on beauty change, but where we’re from changes how we seen beauty. What Americans seen as beautiful may be very different in Russia.

Esther Honig, a journalist and social media manager, sent an untouched photo of herself from the shoulders up to different designers around the world with a simple request: “Make me look beautiful.”

Every photo was different. Some photos looked like they were hardly changed, while some were shockingly different. The only photo to drastically change Honig’s face was the USA. One of the two photos from the USA stretched her face and changed her eyes. They also changed her hairstyle. If someone compared the original with these photos, they’d hardly know they were the same person.

Although the none of the photos were exact replicas, the photos shared some similarities. The eye color was mostly a hazel or blue hue in the edits.

Other than her eyes, the photos featured different hair colors, skin tones, and some even added in jewelry and clothes.

From the video by Jubilee Project and the experiment by Honig, it shows that all ages and races view beauty differently. We change ourselves to make others see us as beautiful, but that is nearly impossible. What someone sees as drop-dead gorgeous, another person may see as gaudy.

Times have changed and so has beauty. Skinny girls are now seen as the standard for attractiveness, but heavier women were seen as prettier way back when. Society always gives us certain ways to look, and they are always changing.

Society holds people to certain standards that are impossible to meet. Celebrities in magazines and photo shoots have their makeup and hair done by professionals before photos, and even after that people trim them and retouch them until they look ‘perfect’.

People, mostly teen girls, are pressured to change themselves to feel accepted by peers. Magazines mislead them with the edited pictures, so girls starve themselves so they can be as pretty as the edited stars.

From a young age unrealistic expectations are set for girls. The well-known barbie doll has impossible proportions and gives young girls an idea of beauty before they even really know what beauty is.

Girls seem to be the main target in negative body images, but boys are affected just as much. It’s highly unlikely that every boy can have a very muscular and fit body with perfectly tanned skin and a white smile.

Overall, it is not very probable that everyone will view someone as gorgeous, but not everyone will see someone as ugly as well. The idea of beauty changes with everyone, and people can’t please everyone. People need to stick to what they see as beautiful, and they shouldn’t change for anyone else.