Volume 9 Issue 1

tuberculosis were often looked to as the beauty
standard, despite it being the cause of almost 25%
of deaths in Europe, according to the Center for
Disease Control. Exaggerated feminine beauty was
exalted during this time; rosy cheeks and lips, pale,
almost translucent skin, and a demure attitude was
demanded for a woman to be considered beautiful.
These harmful ideals held true until the turn
of the 20th century, when class divisions start to
become less stark and working and middle-class
women were able to participate in the wider cultural
scene in ways they hadn’t been able to before.
Women of these classes were able to buy beauty
enhancers and even create them from plants or
minerals that were easily obtainable. This led to the
breakdown of society’s class division in women that
were considered beautiful.
Now, women part of a class other than
the highest had access to these products. This
breakdown led to women who hadn’t participated in
creating the status quo beginning to set the standard,
particularly working class, middle class, and women
of color. Women who felt they could “never live up
to that white beauty ideal” started to make changes,
particularly during the feminist movement of the
1960s and 1970s.
With the beginning of the feminist movement,
the desire for a more natural kind of beauty began to
come back into style, and popular products started to
place heavy emphasis on more natural and organic
beauty products.
Although today’s society has made great
strides in diversifying what qualities are considered
beautiful, “at the end of the day, people still, for some
reason, tie their self-worth to their appearance,” says
Grout. “It might be class-based, it might be social, it
might be related to where they are in life,” she says.
This class barrier can still be seen today, especially
in the types of clothing and products each person
chooses to apply.
“[Beauty]…requires a certain knowledge base,
which is not a new idea it is just one that has exploded
and been amplified in the 21st century,” Grout says.
“It’s also seen in the fashion you choose, whether
it’s fast fashion, sustainable fashion, high fashion,
casual fashion or non-fashion.” This division in what
is seen as “acceptable” to put on the body could lead
to lower- and working-class women to be ostracized
from mainstream beauty ideals altogether, as what is
on-trend just simply isn’t accessible to them.
This idea surrounding how a woman presents
herself has lingered in Southern culture, especially in
Deep South states like Alabama and Georgia.
“I have definitely felt like I have to look
and act a certain way, especially growing up in
Mobile, [Alabama],” says Calista Cleveland, a junior
accounting major at UA. These beauty standards and
class-based ideals are most famously seen in the
debutante balls of the Deep South, where historically
well-to-do families present their daughters to society
once they have come of marrying age. This can feed
into harmful stereotypes of traditional femininity and
masculinity and can eventually lead to a larger
class divide.
For all the strides society has made as a whole
to get closer to accepting all bodies as beautiful,
it seems like something is holding back. Although
women have historically been restrained by hard to
achieve standard of beauty, the proliferation of social
media seems, at times, to be making it worse.
“[Social Media] has become a new public
forum that we didn’t have before, and its magic and
mirage is that it isn’t who you are all the time…so we
get caught up in a system of images,” says Grout. This
can cause college students in particular to think about
their body in harmful ways, as young people haven’t
yet received the message that what is shown on
social media isn’t always the way it looks in real life.
“Every year I delete my social media for
a month, because I would get so caught up in
comparing myself to other people,” says Julia Kirkland,
a junior majoring in Kinesiology at The University of
Alabama. Although the proliferation of social media
has its faults, its widespread use could usher in a
new wave of societal change; especially for those in
historically marginalized communities.
Today there are “new associations between
beauty and the genders… and a proliferation of beauty
types and ideas,” says Grout. Everyone, of every
orientation, is becoming more interested in how to
look “beautiful,” which leads to more definitions of
what beauty truly is.
Everyone deserves to feel good about
themselves, no matter what they look like. For this to
happen, society must make broad, sweeping changes
in all aspects of life, not just in what is
on social media. People of
every shape, race and
orientation deserve
to feel loved,
wanted and most
importantly:
beautiful.
Modeled by
Kiana Younker
Photos by Josha Charlery
Design by Caroline Prince
Alice Fall Alice 2023 Fall (page 2023 #) 9