FINAL REPORT - GROUP 3

BEAUTY
AND
THE BEAST
Pham Nhat Anh, Ngo Ky Khanh Thu, Nguyen Thi
Anh Thu, Le Thi Hong Anh, Nguyen Thuy Duong

TABLE OF CONTENT

RATIONALE 2
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REASON 2
AIMS 2
SCOPE 2
II. OUR PROJECT 3
WORK DIVISION 3
DETAILS 3
LITERATURE REVIEW 4
SURVEY 7
INTERVIEW 14
CONCLUSION 16
FUTURE PLANS 17
RELEVANT SOURCES 17
III. PROBLEMS AND RECOMMENDATIONS 18
PROBLEMS 18
RECOMMENDATIONS 18

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I. RATIONALE

1. REASON
● Beauty standards not only vary by culture and race but also change significantly
throughout history. With that comes unrealistic expectations of what people should
look like in order to be perceived as pretty and be loved, which leads to serious
mental health issues.
● Mainstream beauty standards are biased towards an exclusive club of people who
are slightly underweight, have a fair complexion or are tall and muscular and are
neglectant of traits that make each and everyone of us unique. Statistically, this
benefits next to no one because the majority of the population cannot fit themselves
in such a rigid bracket and all together just make everyone unhappy.
● Although there has been no shortage of papers dedicated to the same topic, almost
none so far are based in Hanoi nor included only surveyees of Vietnamese
nationalities. Given that residents of Hanoi are influenced by an entirely different
culture from those in the studies of our colleagues, we strongly believe this paper
can be of great value to the social science community.
2. AIMS
● Spread positive messages and help people value their own unique beauty.
3. SCOPE
● People within the age group of 13 - 39 years of age.
● Reason:
○ Most affected by beauty standards
○ The main consumers of the beauty industry.

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II. OUR PROJECT

1. WORK DIVISION
Job Task included Responsible

Research Find secondary data on the issue. Ngo Ky Khanh Thu

Survey Invite participants to fill our Nguyen Thi Anh Thu

survey.

Interviews Record participants’ personal Nguyen Thuy Duong

personal takes on the issue

Data analysis Find patterns within the data Pham Nhat Anh
Understand what the numbers
imply

Powerpoint Create a visual aid for our Le Thi Hong Anh

presentation

Edit interview videos Trim out irrelevant footage from Nguyen Thuy Duong
our interview video

Presentation Present our project’s final results All

Final report Give comprehensive details of our All

project

2. DETAILS
● Premise:
○ People of the 13-39 age group are often most affected by current beauty
standards trends as they are the main base for nearly all social media platforms
and therefore, are the sole recipients of the pressure to look a certain way at all
times to be ‘happy’ or be able to experience the same upbeat lifestyle that they
see on social media.
○ We believe that in order to spread positive messages about self - love, one must
first be armed with the information of whether and how much beauty standards
negatively affect a person’s life. Ideally, this information should be packed with
facts from real interviews and surveys and not just based on presumptions that
beauty standards are inherently bad. This paper sets out to lay the groundwork

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for our ultimate aim, which is providing the basic statistics needed for any
solutions to the problem.
● Aim: Spread positive messages and help people value their own unique beauty.
● Thesis statement: Beauty standards have negative impacts on young people
nowadays
○ Reasoning: All of the researchers of this project know of or have witnessed cases
in which beauty standards have wrecked a person’s life and perception of
oneself.
● Action plan:
○ Examine works of other research teams on this topic to find out whether we can
add anything of value to what has already been established.
○ Launch an online survey to attract more respondents
○ Conduct online interviews
● Methodology:
○ Literature review
■ Read research papers online on the topic to understand the trend of
conclusions and the possible hardships we might come across, as well as to
make sure there is novelty to our research paper
■ We have compiled what we have found in the following paper.
○ Survey
■ Create a survey with questions relevant to the topic we are researching
■ Post the survey online and ask for friends and acquaintances to fill in during
a 1 week period.
■ Analyse data collected and draw conclusions accordingly
○ Interview
■ Interview 2 people of our designated target audience, each of which
represents the different opinions that different genders might have.

3. LITERATURE REVIEW
a. Definition
● Beauty standards: the individual qualifications people are expected to meet in order
to be considered “beautiful” and thus, succeed personally and professionally. They
change over time and from culture to culture.
b. Overview of the history of beauty standards
● History shows that standards of beauty are constantly changing, and thus, what
actually constitutes beauty in any given era is very complex.
● The following overview will trace back the standards of beauty through time all the
way from the Middle Ages to today.
● Renaissance
○ Hair should be blond and fine like gold wire
○ Gray eyes were prized above everything else

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○ Women have to appear delicate and destructible

○ Youth, physical strength, and brain power are the ideals for men
● Victorian era
○ The need for asymmetry
Alexander Walker considered definitions of beauty in his 1836 book "Beauty: An
Analysis and Classification." He identified the need for asymmetry, saying that it
is "the first character of beauty in thinking beings. An occasional irregularity
makes us better appreciate symmetry."
○ Seductive and innocent at the same time
○ For men, ideals have not altered much since the Renaissance
● The roaring 20s
○ Hair was cut short to represent the freedom of expression, and was usually
curled and feminine (the bob or a finger wave).
○ Boyish, androgynous and youthful, with minimal breasts, short hair, and a
straight figure without any corseting
○ Tanning and a sporty and healthy appearance was well liked
○ For men, ideals have not altered much although subdued
● The 40s
○ The 1940's fashion was heavily influenced by the second World War. The focus
was no longer on glamour and femininity, and the new value was in functional
and practical clothing.
○ Longer, more feminine hairstyles became popular again
○ Lifted light weights to build muscle tone were emphasised
○ The waist was minimized as a show of femininity
○ For men, ideals have not altered much
● The 60s
○ The body was preferred to be rail thin, straight, boxy, fluted and A-line.
○ Practical short styles were in vogue
○ Some of the main styles were, lady like, preppy, girly innocence, ultra feminine
elegance, and the hippie look.
○ Many African Americans have started to reject white-influenced styles and
adopted trends of their own like returning to the Afro as a sign of black pride
○ men's hairstyles with their their "mop tops", making long hair fashionable for the
first time since the 18th century
● The 80s
○ Bold "virgin" eyebrows
○ Blue eyeshadow or eyeliner matched with shiny pink lips
○ Big hair, big shoulders, and over-the-top makeup.
○ The female body was expected to maintain a certain weight, but still appear
toned, all without being too muscular
○ For men, ideals have not altered much

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● The 2000s
○ There were 4 main types of ideals
○ 1. the average women's figure with "standard measures"
○ 2. classical 90-60-90-Type, with an hourglass figure
○ 3. the sportive type: masculine, tight pelvis, but big breasts
○ 4. the "Barbie type": thin, big breasts, tight pelvis, long legs
○ For men, ideals have not altered much
● The 2010s
○ Big brows and lips
○ A range of hair colours from the traditional black, red, chestnut and blond to neon
pink and green.
○ Natural curves
○ For men, ideals have not altered much
● Why are there so many changes in the beauty industry?
● In 2017, 4 researchers published a preprint paper that attempts to answer this
question in their work named “The effect of the thin body ideal in a media-naïve
populations n”. For which, they traveled to Nicaragua's Mosquito Coast, a deeply
isolated area where villages have no electricity, and therefore no exposure to
television or film. Eighty volunteers, male and female, in those villages were
recruited, and asked to describe their ideal body shape. Half were shown 72
photographs of plus-size models, and the other half were shown 72 photographs of
thin models. After 15 minutes, the villagers were asked to describe their ideal body
image once more. Unsurprisingly, the people who had been looking at plus-size
images made their idealized female bodies fit that standard, while though e who'd
been gazing at size zero women also changed their ideal to fit what they'd seen.
● This means that one's ideals of beauty and therefore society’s is heavily influenced
by the environment, which is bound to change through history.
c. Negative impacts of beauty standards
● In 2019, a paper titled “The impact of exposure to unrealistically high beauty
standards on inhibitory control” has given undeniable evidence that proves raising
appearance concerns in young women results in greater maintenance of executive
inhibitory control in a Stroop task. By exposing seventy-two healthy young women to
pictures of an unrealistically beauty model (vs control pictures), these researchers
have found that comparison with an unrealistically high beauty standard facilitates
the deployment of inhibitory control across time, which means that these women
become more strict on themselves in order to look similar to some versions of the
models they saw.
● This is just a simple experiment that models one instance of something that happens
constantly in a person’s daily life because of social medias, advertisements. The
pressure is always omni-present, so one can imagine the amount of strain there is.

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● Although additional and more direct data are necessary, we are inclined to conclude
that this motivational mechanism corresponds precisely to the motivation to escape
negative self awareness resulting from social comparison with a high standard of
beauty

● In another paper titled “Single exposure to disclaimers on airbrushed thin ideal

images increases negative thought accessibility” (2015) by Leila Selimbegović
Armand Chatard, which focused more on the thin body ideal, 48 female college
students were exposed to a thin ideal image including a disclaimer, a neutral
sentence, or nothing. Two weeks and two months after this, they were again
exposed to the same image but with no accompanying text in any of the conditions.
Negative thought accessibility was assessed three times, after each exposure to the
thin-ideal image, using reaction time measures. Participants randomly assigned to
the disclaimer condition systematically showed greater accessibility of negative
thoughts than those in the other two conditions, irrespective of the time of
measurement.

● Given these two papers, we are inclined to conclude that beauty standards as a
whole have a negative effect on people.
d. Summary
● In short, beauty standards hardly ever stay the same (except for that of men’s)
because of its dependency on politics and social movements. Even within an
average person’s lifetime, there exists at least 3 to 4 shifts in contemporary beauty
standards.
● Multiple research has also shown that beauty standards have negative impacts on
the brain, which further lead us to believe that our hypothesis is correct.
● However, in order to be impartial, we still evaluated data collected from our surveys
and interviews, which will be analysed in the following.

4. SURVEY
a. A brief introduction
● The survey is designed to find out the effects of today’s beauty standards and
people’s perception of beauty. The survey had about 90 responses, of which all
were voluntarily and anonymously done.
● Originally the authors of this paper intended to target surveyees of vastly different
age groups in order to understand the full extent to which beauty standards affect a
person given any age, any gender in Hanoi. However because the nature of our
survey is voluntarily done, we have found that there are significantly more female
responders between 13 and 39 years of age, we have to switch our objective to
investigating the effect current beauty standards have on this particular demographic
or else, the conclusion drawn would be biased and, therefore, false.
b. Responses
● Question 1: How old are you?

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○ Of all 61 respondents, 50,8 % are from 13 to 19 years old, 45,9% are from
the 20-39 age group, and 3,3% are over 40. None of them are under 13
years old.

● Question 2: What is your gender?

○ The majority of the respondents are women, which makes up for 77%.
The other gender groups are men and others with 19,7% and 3,3%
respectively.
○ While we do admit that this can lead to a biased view of what the general
public think about beauty standards, we believe that because our surveys
are done voluntarily, such situations are unavoidable and will be taken into
consideration when we draw the final conclusion.
● Question 3: On a scale from 1 to 4, rate how the way you look is important to
you?

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○ Most of the respondents think that the way they look is somewhat
important while a percentage of 36,1% rated 4 as very important. Only
8.2% do not care so much about how they look.
○ This shows that most people think that they are only mildly affected by
current beauty standards, which is different from the degree to which they
are actually affected.
○ The trends make sense because no one would like to think that they are
on the extreme end of the spectrum.
● Question 4: Do you consider yourself beautiful?

○ A small percentage of 8,2% consider themselves not decent-looking at all,

while 14,8% highly regard their appearances. The others rated themselves
as below and above average with 32,8% and 44,3% respectively.
○ This surprised us tremendously because we expected that the second
option would be the most popular. However, it is also worth mentioning
that the gap between the 2nd and 3rd option is significantly less than each
of them to any of the other options
● Question 5: How would you personally define the word "beautiful?"

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○ For this question, the answers vary considerably. The adjectives with the
highest frequencies are “confident”, “symmetrical”, “clean” and “polite”.
Moreover, it can be seen that people nowadays not only consider
appearances but also personality characteristics and behaviours. They
define “beauty” as a harmonious combination.
● Question 6: Do you often compare your looks to others’?

○ Many of the respondents often compare their looks to others, and only a
small number never does that. Those who always and those who rarely
make comparisons make up the same percentage of 23%.
○ This is quite as we expected because people tend to compare themselves
with others not only their looks but also other aspects such as knowledge,
financial status.

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● Question 7: Do you think your life would be “better” if you better fit society's
definition of beauty?

○ 62,3% of the respondents think that their life would be “better” if they
better fit society’s definition of beauty while the rest think the opposite.
● Question 8: If you had the option to undergo plastic surgery and “correct” a part
of your body, would you go through with it?

○ A percentage of 45,9% would not take the option to undergo plastic

surgery and “correct” a part of their body, while 31,1% chose to do so. The
remaining 23% selected “Maybe” as their option. It is clear that those who
accept the way they were born outweigh those who find a part of their
body imperfect and are willing to undergo plastic surgery to correct that
part.
● Question 9: Do you edit photos of yourself before posting them online?

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○ For this question, there is no big difference in the percentages with 47,5%
of the respondents admitting editing photos of themselves before posting
them online, while the 52,5% chose the opposite.
● Question 10: What do you think are today's beauty standards?

○ The answers for this question also vary. Today’s beauty standards depend
on different countries and regions. However, the most common notion and
often put on women is skinny and voluptuous.
● Question 11: Do you think your beauty standards line up with that of our current
culture?

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○ 45,9% think that their beauty standards quite line up with that of their
current culture, while 34,4% think their standards of beauty don’t quite
match with common notions
○ This means more than half of the respondents are affected by their current
culture as they see themselves compatible with the culture. .
● Question 12: Are you affected by today's beauty standards?

○ 34,4% of the respondents are highly affected by today’s beauty standard,

followed by 44,3% and 16,4% who are quite affected and not very affected
respectively. An outstanding percentage of 4,9% remain unaffected by the
surrounding standards
○ These results show that the majority of people are affected by today’s
beauty standards with different levels, meaning that these beauty
standards are widely recognized and followed.
● Question 13: Do you think beauty standards have more of a negative or positive
effect on a society? Why?

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○ The general opinion is that beauty standards have both positive and
negative effects on a society. While some beauty standards encourage
people to lead a healthy lifestyle and take care of themselves, others may
lead to harmful habits, especially since each individual has different body
types.
○ From this we can conclude that many people can see the effects which
beauty standards have and the consequences they might bring to their
own bodies and health.
c. Overall conclusions
● Female

They consider their appearance as important, most of them are content with their
appearance. When asked how they would define beauty, many of them say they need
to have a pretty, clean face and symmetrical body and be confident, while others think
that we need to have a nice personality and a strong physique as well as a fit body. The
majority of them admitted to being affected by society’s beauty standards. Few people
think that beauty standards have positive impacts on our society, the rest show detest in
beauty perceptions, they consider them to be unrealistic and the cause of unfairness
and, discrimination.

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● Male

The younger generation does not care for their appearance as much as the older
one. They regard being good looking and neat as being “beautiful”. The majority of them
admitted to being affected by society’s beauty standards. Surprisingly, the majority
thinks that society’s beauty perception on people brings positive effects. Unlike common
perception, male also pay attention to how they look.

5. INTERVIEW
a.Purpose
● Get a more in-depth look into people’s thoughts on beauty standards
b.Questions and answers
● Q1: How do you define beauty?
○ Reason: We want to understand the reasons behind why people defined
beauty the way they did in the survey, which is something that only the
interview format can cater to.
● Q2: Do you compare yourself to models and celebrities in magazines? Why?
○ Reason: There’s no doubt that celebrities have a huge influence on
people’s beauty standards. We required our interviewees to state their
opinion and elaborate on how celebrity culture has influenced themselves
for the same reasons.
● Q3: Do you ever feel pressure about how you look? Explain
○ Reason: We want to figure out the reason why they pay attention to their
appearance and the influence of beauty standards.
● Answers:

Question 1 Question 2 Question 3

Pers “To me, beauty comes in the
on A form of knowing how to
emphasize your physical
strengths and minimise your
physical weaknesses. It is not
about being born with
beautiful traits and perfect
body form or shape but rather
you are confident about it and
you are aware of what you
are weak and about”
“In a way, yes. But not “Yes and No. Yes, as I
about how they look. am extremely cautious
Then I look at myself about how I look,
and wonder “How can I especially with my
improve my physical height. But then I figure
appearance?”. Rather I that if I continue to be
just deem the ashamed of it then
celebrities and my idols people will keep using
are the one I aspire to it as a weapon to make
become or at least ans fun of me. I go out and
aspect of their meet a lot of people
personalities that I who have disabilities
aspire to achieve” and physical

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disadvantages.
Somehow they still
manage to live their
lives to the fullest and I
start asking myself
“why should I be afraid
of my weaknesses,
which is my height?”
because it is not my
fault that I am this
short. I choose to live in
the way that people
won’t look at me based
on how I look on the
outside but rather they
choose to go out with
me because how fun I
am

Pers “Ok so I have searched for
on B different definitions of beauty
but the finest definition that I
have ever heard is “beauty is
in the eye of the beholder”.
You don't need to be
considered pretty by a lot of
people. You just need to be
pretty for someone who
appreciates it and you still be
a beautiful girl.”
.“Because I know that “I have a lot of
pictures and photos of insecurity about my
celebrities and models face and my body,
have all been especially when I was
photoshopped before back in grade 9.
being published and I Because at that time I
know that they have a ate a lot and was a
vibe that normal people pretty chubby girl, I felt
like me can not have so very timid about myself
I rarely compare myself and I was very afraid of
to them.” people talking about
me”

c. Conclusion
● Both of the interviewees are members of Generation Z, which we believe is
greatly influenced by social assumptions about beauty. However, there is a
significant distinction because they appear to value their individuality and are
unwilling to follow the latest beauty "trend."
● Person A proves his maturity throughout his answers, which is considered to be
appropriate in his age of 23. He seems to express his interest and admiration for
the celebrities’ characters rather than their physical appearance.

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● Person B is more realistic. She shows accurate and profound knowledge of the
beauty industry and its secrets. Therefore, she understands that there is no point
in comparing herself with those people.
● Both of them are passively aware of their appearance since they experienced
body shaming in the past

6. CONCLUSION
At the end of our project, we have come to the conclusion that although beauty
standards do not affect people's life as negatively as we have presumed, their
impact is still at an alarming level worthy of researchers’ attention and the
public’s awareness alike.

Based on the data that our survey and interviews have yielded, we can say with
confidence that those of generation Z and late Millennials have understood the
harms that unrealistic beauty standards can have on their mental health and thus
have learned to change their mindset.

Despite these positive trends, we must also note that this is not true to everyone
and that belief in these unrealistic beauty standards is still omni present in the
back of our mind (as proven by the survey results). Further actions must be taken
to spread this piece of information and keep the trend from dipping downwards.

7. FUTURE PLANS
We plan on doing more research into various aspects surrounding the effect of
beauty standards as well as conduct a more controlled survey and gather more
participants to have more accurate data. Moreover, we will expand our scope to
a larger audience and subjects. When we finish researching and have a clear
problem and information to work with, we will team up with other research teams
to come up with a solution to raise awareness about the negative effects of
beauty perception and encourage people to embrace their own unique traits.

8. RELEVANT SOURCES
● Source articles
○ BEAUTY IDEAL OVER THE DECADES part 11: THE 20's - Idealist Style
○ BEAUTY IDEAL OVER THE DECADES part 9 : THE 40's - Idealist Style
○ BEAUTY IDEAL OVER THE DECADES part 7 : THE 60's - Idealist Style
○ BEAUTY IDEAL OVER THE DECADES part 5 : THE 80's - Idealist Style
○ BEAUTY IDEAL OVER THE DECADES part 3 : THE 2000's - Idealist Style
○ BEAUTY THROUGH HISTORY - The Washington Post (1987)
○ The Ideal Man: Male Beauty Standards Through History - The Collector
(2021)

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● References:
○ The impact of exposure to unrealistically high beauty standards on inhibitory
control - L. Selimbegović, Catherine Juneau (2019)
○ Single exposure to disclaimers on airbrushed thin ideal images increases
negative thought accessibility - Leila Selimbegović, Armand Chatard (2015)
○ Beauty: Analysis and Classification of Beauty in Woman - Alexander Walker
(2011)

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III. PROBLEMS AND RECOMMENDATIONS

1. PROBLEMS
● We have not thought the questions for the survey through so the conclusions we
have drawn are not clear cut and are not as definite as we have originally
intended.
● The interviews were not well designed enough to draw out interesting information
from our interviewees.
● Upon revision, our findings would benefit from interviews with professionals on
the topic.

2. RECOMMENDATIONS
● Further research should be done to determine if our findings are applicable to a
wider range of audience as well as how to spread the newly found information far
and wide.
● Future research should consider the different parties involved in the topic of
research even if they are not directly involved.

- END -

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