How to glow up.
I’m sure you’ve seen at least one short-form video that starts with some form of these words. In a world so critical about how we look, it’s no surprise that people are curious about elevating their looks. However, these types of videos do more harm than good, as they serve to bring down people’s self-esteem by constantly making people think that particular features are ugly.
When most people think of the term glow-up, they think of using makeup, skincare, or other facial products to make them more pretty. Some might even think about changing up their clothing style. Most people would agree that glowing up means fitting into specific beauty standards. However, beauty standards have proven to be incredibly unrealistic.
According to Bradley University, one beauty standard for women is to be curvy yet thin and toned. As for their faces, dewy skin with flushed cheeks and a bit of mascara is very popular, according to the Institute of Cosmetology.
Unfortunately, these standards are commonly impossible to achieve. Being curvy and thin at the same time requires extreme work to someone’s body, which creates unhealthy and prodigal lifestyles as constant money is being spent to fix one’s body. It also makes women insecure as they may believe their body is inadequate due to the beauty standards.
According to the University of Florida, dieting or restrictive eating can produce feelings of shame and body dissatisfaction, which can later develop into disordered eating or body dysmorphia.
However, it wasn’t always like this. According to Nena Sterner Photography, in the 1920s, women started to ditch restrictive corsets in favor of clothing like pants and short hair. During this time, women were fighting to prove their capabilities, so beauty standards were used to defy how men wanted women to look and act.
Even during the 6000s B.C.E., which makeup dates back to, it had become affluential, as only the rich and elite used it to show their status, according to Halifax Public Libraries. Both men and women wore it, creating a mutual feeling of enjoying makeup to elevate themselves. However, after the economy boomed and the Gross Domestic Profit (GDP) per country grew, these unrealistic standards only became more widespread as products became more accessible.
A popular term created and popularized due to social media when talking about glowing up is the term boy-pretty. While there is no concrete definition of this term, I believe that the term refers to a girl who is attractive and has a sex appeal that attracts men. This is incredibly toxic, as this teaches girls that glowing up is only to satisfy men rather than self-care for themselves.
While more people have started defying the standards, only wearing makeup for elevation, most still are influenced by other reasons. Unfortunately, due to the rise of social media, many women, more specifically teens, have turned to comparing themselves to other women on the internet.
The College of Coastal Georgia claims that social scientists have documented that exposure to unrealistic beauty standards in the media is correlated with a range of mental health challenges, especially for girls. While posting is not a problem, when multiple of these posts flood one’s feed, girls can feel very insecure and sensitive about their looks, ultimately turning to beauty standards as a solution to fix their looks.
If these videos aim to bring people down, why do teens click on them? Because they are full of empty promises. The promise that if you do these things in a certain way, you will become pretty is false because this isn’t how beauty works. Beauty isn’t something one can achieve because everyone already has it.
“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” A famous quote coined by Margaret Wolfe Hungerford, an Irish novelist who wrote light romantic fiction. It means that no one can judge beauty because of its subjective nature. That’s what teenagers fail to understand. There is no one version of beauty; everyone is beautiful in their own way. And mean comments towards someone based on their looks fail to recognize everything that makes them pretty.
