The Ugly Truth Of Beauty Magazines

When we purchase beauty magazines, what are we really buying into?

That's the question one particular YouTube user is asking us to consider in his new video titled, Stay Beautiful: Ugly Truth In Beauty Magazines.

The short video delivers some powerful points about how women's magazines perpetuate unrealistic beauty standards through a combination of advertisements and the careful curation of what an "ideal" woman should look like.

Hidden within the glossy sheets of popular women's magazines are insidious messages about how we should look and behave. Also (funnily enough) the products we should buy in order to obtain that image.

It's worth mentioning here that women have been critiquing and offering poignant perspectives on beauty magazines for a long time. Take for instance, Adele Hasinoff, a feminist who has published a number of papers about female representation in women's magazines.

It's not only fully fledged women's magazines which perpetrate the importance of looking good. Magazines marketed at pre-teen demographics follow the same trend, offering young girls beauty advice and dating tips.

Take a look at this comparison between two gendered magazines: Girls' Life and Boys' Life

The Dove Global Beauty and Confidence Report revealed that only 20 per cent of Australians admitted to having high self-esteem. That means the vast majority of women are unhappy with how they look, to some degree.

In fact, 89 per cent of women said they had opted to cancel plans, job interviews and other important engagements simply because of how they looked.

In response to the increased visibility of body-positivity campaigns, Kaila Prins - a female writer - puts forward a different (perhaps, more radical) perspective.

"There is so much pressure on women to 'feel beautiful' from both sides, that I often wonder what would happen if we stopped oppressing ourselves with the concept of beauty in general," she says.

"What if we stopped spending so much damn time trying to lie to ourselves about how beautiful we are and started focusing on things that actually mattered? What if we just took beauty out of the equation completely?"

For women, it seems as though we're constantly told to "look good" and "feel good" but in all actuality, there will always be times where we don't identify with either of those things.

Which is totally fine. we're only human, right?

Photo: Twitter (@JenAshleyWright) and YouTube (@OskarTBrand)