Universal Beauty Ideals in Women's Magazines

Hollywood has changed the way the world perceives beauty. White beauty has clearly sought precedence over beauty of other races, namely Asians, and is considered being a mainstream beauty standard. Mainstream bioethics in the United States originates from a white Anglo-Saxon protestant worldview, which serves silently to perpetuate white dominance (Arekapudi and Wynia, 2003). It has strongly influenced how Asians want to look these days, and Asian women show preferences for beauty standards outside of the Asian ingroup, especially for white women (Evans and McConnell, 2003).

Hollywood culture consists of good-looking, physically attractive people. Physically attractive individuals are often viewed more favourably than unattractive people on dimensions that are weakly related or unrelated to physical looks, glamorized such as intelligence, sociability, and morality (Smith, McIntosh and Bazzini, 1999). The fact that Hollywood culture is predominantly white, Caucasian and that it has such power over people, shows how it is considered to be the mainstream standard of beauty. Celebrities like Lindsay Lohan and Nicole Ritchie, both nothing short of looks, are very skinny and rumoured to have eating disorders. Pervasive billboards and Hollywood ideals often contribute to feelings of physical inadequacy (James, 2003). They are part of the Hollywood culture and what they have to be what every female should look like. This, on a whole, makes up what we term “white beauty”.

Because the media portrays Hollywood culture as “divine” and the fact that the media is so powerful and influential in telling people what to think, “white beauty” is what most females look up to and want to be. As Asians possess features that are far from the Caucasian white features, they think that they do not look as good or that they cannot be as “beautiful” as the whites. Some members of stigmatized groups, such as Asian women, may be more likely to experience negative self-evaluations after exposure to a mainstream beauty standard than

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members of other stigmatized groups, such as Black women (Evans and McConnell, 2003). Media is a powerful channel for the development of new ideas and potential behaviour and the mass media has a powerful influence on audiences (Miller and Philo, 1996).

Although there are many studies that have examined the effect of the mass media on females (specifically female adolescents) in terms of body image, there exist very few studies that have examined