Part of beauty is objective and is based on signals of health and fertility. Those aren’t going to change anytime soon. Handsome men have better health and better genes than ugly men, while young and attractive women are more healthy and more fertile than old and ugly women.
But beauty is also partly about status. Back when the poor were starving and working 12 hour days in manual labor, the poor were all skinny. So being fat was attractive because being fat meant you had wealth.
Then when processed foods came along and the poor had enough to eat, it became attractive to be thin. Part of this is that being thin requires a lot of extra time, money and effort/energy. Being thin showed you had the excess time, money and effort to focus on being thin, all things that poor people tend to lack.
But with newer weight loss drugs coming about (not just the GLP-1 meds, but there are at least 5 receptors the new generations of injectable peptides work with) combined with the fact that even more weight loss drug will be coming in the years and decades ahead, being thin will not be nearly as hard.
When that happens, do beauty standards change again to become something that only people with excess time, money and effort/energy can have? I assume it will and I’m assuming by the 2030s or 2040s we will start having new beauty standards, I’m just not sure what they will be. But I’m guessing it’ll be something that only people with excess time, money and mental energy can obtain.
There will still be objective markers of beauty. Sexual dimorphism, signals of health, signals of fertility, etc. But beauty is also based on status, and being thin will not be a status symbol when the poor can achieve it with ease.
If we develop effective methods of sculpting our bodies without all the work of diet and exercise, Beauty will become Fashion. Some influencer will declare that, “This Spring, Giant Earlobes are the Thing!”, and like with clothing fashion, people will spend money chasing the latest fashion. If you’re sporting earlobes from three seasons ago, well, you’re obviously a Poor. Ewww.
Being thin has in Western culture been the norm since the early 20th century. Charles Dana Gibson took elements of beauty standards and combined them into “the Gibson Girl, who was tall and slender, yet with ample bosom, hips and buttocks.” That was still the standard in the early 21st century. Gibson’s illustrations were for high-status magazines, taking several years from the 1890s to infiltrate down to the rest of the culture.
Some eras differed. The flapper girls of the 1920s de-emphasized curves for a thin, flat figure. Many silent movies stars were 5’ tall or less. But the standard began reappearing and soon height was again desirable, soon creating very well known models.
The 1950s went to an extreme with more than ample bosoms, as well as all-over curves, such as the Playboy centerfolds, who were always also thin. The 1960s saw a blip of flapper type models but supermodels - models who somehow were naturally extremely tall and thin yet also curvy - pushed them aside.
Only in the 21st century have we seen a societal attempt to accept many non-thin body types into fashion and popular culture. Large segments of the public have been unaccepting. Most models and still tall and thin. Women with curves are still idols - especially in the black community where especially curvy figures are desired to the point where white model types are denigrated for having inadequate sizing. Ours is a culture where the hawk tuah girl - a standard pretty southern blonde with a thin but curvy body - can receive instant fame and piles of money after being caught cutely on camera. She would have become just the joke if she weren’t such an exemplar of long-lived beauty standards.
Prominent people who once proclaimed body positivity for heavier figures are now turning to GLP-1 meds and slimming down. Millions of ordinary people are also doing so. A gigantic societal pressure is already developing for insurance to handle the drugs so they can be used by people without $1000/month to spend on them.
Thinness will therefore remain the standard, and an element of status. Heavier people will be scorned as they had been. Thin people will be rated by their looks and figures and clothing and makeup and hair and accessories for fine gradations of status. What’s old will be new again.
Maybe, but… as you suggest, the main point in revolving fashions is to show you can afford the latest. Unless bodies become infinitely malleable, the side-effects of frequent visible body changes will outweigh the gains.
Look at the status of tattoos over the years. From appearing only on social pariahs they suddenly starting turning up in pop culture leaders, like rock stars, to being almost universal among both sexes. Not all that long ago in cultural time, you couldn’t get hired with visible tattoos. Now grocery stores routinely have cashiers who are tattooed and pierced
What I’m hearing about recently is that people think they have gone overboard and are using laser and other technologies to remove them. Will tattoos be a mark of a certain class or time and shunned in the future? And what will replace them?
I was discussing this with my tattooed son recently. He thinks that his daughter and her friends are less interested in them simply because their parents have them, like all the other “old people.”
Future economic/ecological conditions will also play a role; I recall many years ago reading a sci-fi short story that offhandedly mentioned that being plump had become fashionable again since the poor often couldn’t afford much food. A scenario I could see happening if, for example such issues as climate change, the increasing scarcity of freshwater and topsoil erosion cause famine to make a comeback.
That said, “official” beauty standards will be something difficult and expensive to achieve; that’s their point as a status symbol. Whether the general public will share that opinion is another matter, especially as class divides get larger. Judging from some of the things old-time aristocrats did the wealthy might go off on some bizarre tangent that most people find ugly or ridiculous.
On average, yes. These things are an indicator / suggestion.
In terms of your overall point, yes I’d basically agree, and I can add the example of level of skin tan. For much of western history, time spent outdoors implied manual and agricultural labor and therefore poverty and a hard life, vs pale skin implying wealth and privilege. Ergo, pale skin was desirable.
Then in the 20th century, a tan became cool as it was associated with people with the wealth and desire to jet around the world.
Now we seem to be in a kind of in a middle position because a tan or lack of doesn’t really say much about a person’s wealth or lifestyle.
(And yes, all this is speaking only of white people, just for simplicity’s sake for a moment)
I would make a distinction between beauty and fashion though. I think fashion is largely an arbitrary invention of society. But what we consider beautiful has at least some hard-wired basis.
I don’t think every society independently decided that clear skin is more attractive than pustules.
There’s a complex interplay, but I just don’t think the whole thing is arbitrary.
I think the OP drastically overestimates the efficacy and availability of weight loss meds, both current and plausible future.
It’s interesting to talk about the sociology of a fantasy world where monstrously immobiley fat, skin-and-bones scawny, or anything in between is as easy as deciding which clothes to wear.
Who has been speaking in those terms? The OP was just talking about slimming, which, yes, is still not trivial even with the latest weight-loss drugs, but efficacy is a lot better than anything that we had 5 years ago and even more effective drugs are on the horizon.
Fat may be beautiful but it’s simply not healthy. I ache when the body positive people say that any weight they’re comfortable with is fine. Weight is not good for the body in multiple ways.
Excess thinness is also not healthy, and the extreme diets and lengths that some people use to get skinny are not good for them either.
Overall, however, thin is better, and a fit body will usually be a thin one. Few fat athletes out there except perhaps shot putters.
This. Maybe the standards of society as a whole will slowly change, but I suspect that an individual’s specific tastes are much harder to change. My”type” hasn’t changed since puberty, other than that the age of the women I find attractive has gone up along with my own age. Even if there has been a gradual change over the decades in what physical features I find attractive, it’s definitely not a “this body type is no longer fashionable this season, so now my standards have changed” type of thing.
In other words, my guess is that for societal standards of physical beauty to change, the people who make up society have to change.
I would go farther than this. I think that “type” for most men is fixed during puberty or the years after. That would explain why many men find younger women so attractive that they leave settled marriages for younger women whose top attraction is her body. And the proliferation in porn of “barely legal,” “young,” “lolita,” “school-girl,” and other age indicators to describe women that are anywhere from 18-30.
Society currently and loudly has determined that 18 is the minimum age for men to admire, but also that an ever-narrowing span of age difference in relationships is disgusting even if post-college age women are involved.
This is purely societal. Within my lifetime, a majority of working-class kids in America left school at the minimum age, usually 16, in some states younger. (This was true in Britain as well, and probably elsewhere.) They were then considered to be adults, who advanced to either work or marriage. The 1950s were rife with songs extolling girls at this age: “Sweet Little Sixteen,” “You’re Sixteen,” “!6 Candles,” “You’re Sixteen You’re Beautiful (And You’re Mine).” The Beatles “I Saw Her Standing There” - “Well, she was just seventeen* / If you know what I mean” - falls into this genre. Paul was 18 when he came up with it. Rock stars lived the lyrics in their real lives, most notoriously Jerry Lee Lewis.
What society claims is acceptable or preferable can change very quickly. People, as you say, might change at a much slower pace, and we’re seeing that. The tension between ideal and actual makes for rifts and is therefore unstable. We’ll probably see a change in these attitudes over the next generation, but which way - it doesn’t have to be one of these two - is unpredictable.
This is tangentially related, but I read a scientific paper that looked at what women value most in a male partner. It depended on what environmental stressors were the strongest.
In environments where infectious diseases were strong, women preferred men who were handsome and good looking. Good looks are a proxy for health and a strong immune system.
In environments where poverty and income inequality was a major issue, women preferred men who had resources.
I don’t have the paper onhand, I just glossed over it years ago. But basically what we find attractive also changes based on what the biggest threats to survival are based on our environment.
Drugs like ozempic go off patent in 2026 in places like China, India and Brazil. All nations that have robust pharmaceutical manufacturing facilities. Also China is working on a variety of its own injectable peptides for weight loss. This means in theory that the market will be flooded with cheap injectable weight loss drugs in a few years.
But there are multiple receptors involved in weight loss that drugs are being marketed towards. GLP-1, GIP, GCGR, DARCA, etc.
The drug retatrutide is in phase 3 trials. It is an agonist for GLP-1, GIP and GCGR. It causes a 24% weight loss in a year, which is comparable to bariatric surgery.
We may be in a world in the 2030s where people can lose large amounts of weight and keep it off with affordable medications. In that scenario, it won’t only be people with excess time, money and mental energy who can lose weight and be thin. So society will look for some other body modification that only people with excess time, money and effort are able to obtain.
Cite please? Because I’d bet that any number of working class individuals historically (well, the skilled/well fed freemen at least) were healthier than the more “attractive” inbred upper class who bred in part for looks. For that matter, you could have someone terribly disfigured (by society’s standards) with a huge facial birthmark or later scarring, but is in great health while someone with “perfect” features has a thousand and one congenital issues.
Since so much of attractiveness is socially based, it’s a huge error to decide it’s tired to some sort of superior health or genes. The only accurate portion of that argument IMHO is that healthy looking, young looking (while sexually mature in general) LOOK more attractive than otherwise. IE the reverse of your argument. And even then, social cues (for a general or subset of society) trump even that. I mean, I knew plenty of 1990s goths (when I was a late teen to twenty something) that deliberately looked like death warmed over, but that was HOT for that group.
Given that (as mentioned upthread) the current weight loss drugs are helpful but still far from the magic bullet, I think that we’re assuming too much. I don’t think it’ll change beauty standards but might reduce the initial bar to entry for those who were previously overweight and obese. But the trends for South Korean surgically enhanced beauty, even by those who (to my eyes at least) are already above average in looks, means we’ll always be fighting for some societal or personal ideal. Even if it’s not otherwise attainable due to body type, bone structure, or what have you.
They didn’t breed for looks as far as I know; not that it would have worked if they tried. And sickliness was widely considered attractive, since it was so common among the inbred “elite”. Being healthy and strong was considered a sign of crudity and primitiveness among many.
However, the main point you are missing is that two different standards are being talked about. There’s the fairly hardwired “healthy = attractive” standard, and the much more culturally defined “looking like someone of high status” standard.
There are a lot of factors, which I mentioned as “in part” and for culturally and social level based status as you mentioned. A peasant’s requirement for beauty and health would be different than an aristocrats, which was what I was most concerned of - back to the OP’s quote which I wanted a cite for:
I see zero evidence that handsome or ugly are indicators of genetic superiority outside of extreme (and even then, not always heritable) abnormalities of body structure.