Beautiful Virgin Islands

Wednesday, May 13, 2026

Is Beauty Culture Hurting Us?

The internet has transformed beauty culture from an exclusive domain of models and magazines to the broad, accessible world of social media. In recent years, research shows that more and more women are saying that they feel beautiful. But at the same time, the vast majority of women say they feel pressure to be beautiful. Glad You Asked hosts Cleo Abram and Joss Fong explore the benefits and costs of today’s beauty culture.
Key Sources:
Fifty Years Ago, Protesters Took on the Miss America Pageant and Electrified the Feminist Movement https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/fifty-years-ago-protestors-took-on-miss-america-pageant-electrified-feminist-movement-180967504/

The Digital Beauty Counter: How Beauty Marketers can Connect to Consumers Through Youtube, Facebook, and Instagram Video https://www.pixability.com/insights-reports/digital-beauty-counter/

Beauty Shop Politics, by Tiffany Gill https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/86hdc8fp9780252035050.html

Beauty Sick, by Renee Engeln https://www.harpercollins.com/9780062469793/beauty-sick/

Beauty in a World of Flux https://www.usa.philips.com/c-dam/corporate/newscenter/global/standard/resources/healthcare/2019/global-beauty-index/Philips-Beauty-Bookazine-2019-interactive-version.pdf

Unsupervised Discovery of Gendered Language through Latent-Variable Modeling
https://copenlu.github.io/publication/2019_acl_hoyle/

Honesty tops list of traits that people say society values most in men; physical attractiveness top trait for women https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2017/12/05/americans-see-different-expectations-for-men-and-women/pst_12-05-17-gender-02-00/

The State of Gender Equality for U.S. Adolescents https://www.planusa.org/docs/state-of-gender-equality-2018.pdf

2018 Cosmetic Surgery Gender Distribution https://www.plasticsurgery.org/documents/News/Statistics/2018/cosmetic-procedures-women-2018.pdf

2017 Cosmetic Plastic Surgery Statistics https://www.plasticsurgery.org/documents/News/Statistics/2017/cosmetic-procedure-trends-2017.pdf
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