Beauty Standards Quotes

“Think of cocaine. In its natural form, as coca leaves, it's appealing, but not to an extent that it usually becomes a problem. But refine it, purify it, and you get a compound that hits your pleasure receptors with an unnatural intensity. That's when it becomes addictive.

Beauty has undergone a similar process, thanks to advertisers. Evolution gave us a circuit that responds to good looks - call it the pleasure receptor for our visual cortex - and in our natural environment, it was useful to have. But take a person with one-in-a-million skin and bone structure, add professional makeup and retouching, and you're no longer looking at beauty in its natural form. You've got pharmaceutical-grade beauty, the cocaine of good looks.

Biologists call this "supernormal stimulus" [...] Our beauty receptors receive more stimulation than they were evolved to handle; we're seeing more beauty in one day than our ancestors did in a lifetime. And the result is that beauty is slowly ruining our lives.

How? The way any drug becomes a problem: by interfering with our relationships with other people. We become dissatisfied with the way ordinary people look because they can't compare to supermodels.”
― Ted Chiang, Stories of Your Life and Others

“Girls have always been told that their value is tied to their appearance; their accomplishments are always magnified if they're pretty and diminished if they're not. Even worse, some girls get the message that they can get through life relying on just their looks, and then they never develop their minds. [...]

Being pretty is fundamentally a passive quality; even what you work at it, you're working at being passive.”
― Ted Chiang, Stories of Your Life and Others

“Twice in my life now, I have buried myself in finery. Twice, I have arranged myself within a great compilation of fabric to prove that I understand the importance of a moment. It's clothing as contrition - a performance of beauty I have to put on to pay penance to the people gathered to acknowledge me. They are here to see me. And I must apologize for requesting their attention. Must make up for the weight of my demand by ensuring that looking at me will be a pleasant thing. Never mind the suffocation of the outfit, never mind the expense, never mind the impracticality. The transaction must be made. My efforts at beauty in exchange for their regard. And so, twice in my life, I have worn the cost of that recognition.”
― Sarah Gailey, The Echo Wife

“Instead of criminal, women's bodies are inherently defective, aesthetically defective. To the body whose value is judged almost solely on aesthetics, it is a devastating sentence. We are too short, too tall, too fat, too thin, too dark, too stiff, too loose, too solicitous, too yielding, too assertive, too weak, or too strong.”
― Melissa Febos, Girlhood

“Lift the breasts high, but not so high that they tower over the men. They do not like it if a woman is taller than them. So shrink.
Be young. Never ever grow old.
Don't live, don't breed without permission, but always give pleasure.”
― K.P. Kulski, Fairest Flesh

“We are at that age where men get sexier, and women get Botox.”
― Aggie Blum Thompson, I Don't Forgive You

“live loud and proud like you deserve
and reject their bullshit definition
of what a woman should look like”
― Rupi Kaur, Home Body

“you are not racism.
you are not racism.
you are not racism.
you are not racism.
you are not racism.
your skin is not burden.
there is no mark against you.
your being is a holy beauty.
you.
are a holy beauty.
— ether”
― Nayyirah Waheed, Nejma

“Who says you have to be rich in order to be strong and beautiful?”
― AriaKang

“Wrinkles are devastating for women! A quite undeserved punishment! Because no woman deserves a wrinkled face. Wrinkles should be hidden in the heart, or perhaps not, perhaps not even in your heart, because wrinkles there might be fatal and we ought not to die, though we might as well, because when a woman has wrinkles she's already half dead, and couldn't care less if she died.”
― Rosa Maria Arquimbau, Forty Lost Years

“You know what? Who cares what normal is, Simone. Let's protest. From now on we're the anti-normal, anti-average, anti-standard. You can eat when you want to, I'll wear what I want, and we'll die with a packet of chips in our hand and a tablecloth on our head.”
― Randa Abdel-Fattah, Does My Head Look Big In This?

“For me, beauty says nothing. It is a still image on glossy paper. I am fascinated by imperfection, it is neither ugly nor flawed, it is the expression of life!”
― Isa Millot

“قيمة المظهر توازي قيمة الجوهر”
― كارلوس زافون

“Such was puberty, one big masochistic joke set in the halfway house of middle school, where kids endure the three most confusing and sensitive years of their lives, where girls who've already sprouted D cups and know about blow jobs sit beside girls in trainers from the Gap who still have crushes on anime characters. A time when anything that is unique about ourselves, anything that makes us depart ever so slightly from the collective, prototypical vision of popular beauty becomes an agonizing pockmark and self denial the only remedy at hand.”
― Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart

“Beauty Ain't Beauty (The Sonnet)

Beauty is not in the eye of the beholder,
Beauty is in the heart of the beholder.
Eyes have evolved not to perceive beauty,
But to look for a fertile progenitor.
All instincts of beauty are prehistoric,
All impulse of attraction is mere heat.
Such tendency is an act of animal libido,
It has nothing to do with human heartbeat.
If you wanna discover someone's beauty,
You gotta throw the dirt off your heart.
Observe their behavior outside the body,
Only then shall you witness true beauty's path.
Across the vacuum of body lies the valley of beauty.
Defy the vacuum, and you'll realize, beauty is divinity.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Bulldozer on Duty

“Lovers of surface are destined to fall.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Amor Apocalypse: Canım Sana İhtiyacım

“Curves, Clothes, Character (The Sonnet)

Your abs won't last, your racks won't last,
Eventually everything ends up in wrinkle.
Polish the outside all you want but,
All curves are crookery if the heart is wrinkled.
Slimness is not the same as fitness,
Skinship is not the same as kinship.
Etiquettes don't elevate the world,
Apparels don't bring liberty and leadership.
Waste not the life on measuring your waist,
All waist is waste if the backbone is malnourished.
Fitness is fiction when shallowness runs rampant,
All curves are filth if the being remains prejudiced.
Curves and clothes have no bearing on character whatsoever.
Better a character out of shape, than a shape without character.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Mucize Misafir Merhaba: The Peace Testament

“Better a character out of shape, than a shape without character.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Mucize Misafir Merhaba: The Peace Testament

“Your abs won't last, your racks won't last,
Eventually everything ends up in wrinkle.
Polish the outside all you want but,
All curves are crookery if the heart is wrinkled.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Mucize Misafir Merhaba: The Peace Testament

“True Beauty is not world’s view of Beauty based almost entirely on external appearance True Beauty is not coloring or dying hair or having expensive haircuts True Beauty is not in competition, modeling or in cat walks True Beauty in women is when you live a Godly life.”
― Shaila Touchton

“Waarom zouden we mooi moeten zijn? Waarom draait alles daarom? Mooi voor wie? Noem me een heldin. Noem me vindingrijk. Noem me een fucking wervelstorm. Ja, dat wil ik zijn, een wervelstorm.”
― Sophie Hardcastle, Below Deck

“Across the vacuum of body lies the valley of beauty.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Bulldozer on Duty

“Pretty women is when comfort with your own skin, comfort sama pakaian yang dipakai, and one is important, kamu cantik kalau kamu pede dan bangga sama diri kamu sendiri”
― Tamara Aulia

“Women are taught that our bodies must be fixed and that, if given the power to do so, we should use it.”
― Danielle Prescod, Token Black Girl

“I don’t like clever girls," I said. "And I don't like tall blonde girls. I like small girls with hair like autumn leaves.”
― Agatha Christie, Endless Night

“When you want to be a woman, follow my advice. Speak in a thin, pretty voice. It has to be high-pitched. Try pushing it up into your nose. Cover your mouth when you laugh. Press down firmly and neatly when writing. Grow your hair to your shoulders. Curls are discouraged. Flap your wrists often. Show enthusiasm about grocery shopping and cooking. Beef up your cooking skills. Be unfailingly kind to others—especially men. Use your charm to get out of danger. Fall in love with a man. Eat very little. Even if you really want to finish it, leave some on your plate. Make sure you attain a slim figure and maintain it for your whole life. Play dumb, with no regard for your actual intelligence. Disparage your driving. Be chatty. Try your best to sincerely enjoy cleaning and doing laundry. Think of weakness as a virtue, and let your strength rot away. Wear makeup even in your dreams. Wear bright clothing. Conceal your sexual appetite, and take it to your grave. Become shyness incarnate. . . . There’s a fuckton more where that all comes from. I just couldn’t write it all down. To act the part of a woman, you’ve got to memorize a hefty script.”
― Dolki Min, Walking Practice

“I accepted the edict I was in control of my body and didn't have to adhere to societal beauty standards. I happened to like the feeling of shaved legs under fresh sheets.”
― Valentine Glass, Jarring Sex

“All other women were allowed to be ugly, to be hideous, to have all kinds of defects and flaws in their appearance. But I had to be pretty; if I did not look good, I had lost any right to exist, to be a woman ......”
― Lili Elbe, Man into Woman: The First Sex Change

“Beauty is akin to poison. Poison that smoothers us, intoxicates us and then slowly kills us.”
― Ryan Gelpke, Dying in Champoussin

“Pretty women is when you are comfort with your own skin, comfort sama pakaian yang dipakai, and one is important, kamu cantik kalau kamu percaya dan bangga sama diri kamu sendiri”
― Tamara Aulia