The 4 “beauty ideals” that fuel everyday prejudice

Very occasionally, I’ll sit with a group of friends and we’ll congratulate ourselves on how little we care about beauty.

“It’s all vanity,” someone says, followed by grunts of agreement.

“The youth today are so obsessed with their looks. They don’t know what inner beauty is.”

We all nod along sagely. We pontificate and moralize, ignoring the hypocrisy of how we each took a long time to choose an outfit from an expensive wardrobe of sartorial baubles. We say that beauty is unimportant.

But it’s hugely important. If we have children and tell them, “Looks don’t matter,” we’re lying to them. What kind of naïveté pretends the world is not a visual one?

That’s one idea philosopher Heather Widdows explores in her book, Perfect Me: Beauty as an Ethical Ideal. In this week’s Mini Philosophy interview, Widdows and I discussed a widely accepted yet hugely damaging prejudice that most people still tolerate: lookism.

The 4 beauty ideals

People have always been concerned with beauty. It takes a highly selective and biased historian to think beauty has never been important. And the need to be beautiful has always placed huge demands on those wanting to look good: Emaciating diets, rib-crushing corsetry, and brutal foot binding are not artifacts to be ignored lightly. The difference, though, as Widdows puts it, is that these were not global ideals. The difference between a “local” beauty ideal and a “global” ideal is how, today, beauty standards are normalized and naturalized.

Widdows focuses on four examples of global beauty ideals: thinness, firmness, smoothness, and youthfulness. Where, in the past, these were called “beautiful,” they were, more or less, a matter of taste. But today, in almost all cultures, women — and increasingly men — are expected to be smooth. The hairy and saggy are abnormal. Women who do not shave their armpits are not only repulsive; they’re deviant.

Framing such characteristics as normal or abnormal, acceptable or deviant, turns beauty from an aesthetic ideal into an ethical one. Beauty has often been considered part of a happy life but it hasn’t been seen as its defining factor. Today, beauty is often perceived as the key to love, money, power, friendship, acceptance, self-worth, and so on. We give moral worth to aesthetic beauty.

Beauty aspirations

It’s the ethical component of beauty that brings the compulsion to conform. There is no compulsion with taste. You do not feel a pressing, desperate need to watch only certain types of movies or listen to certain music genres — they are about taste. Beauty is not only defined globally by a narrow and narrowing criterion; it’s also the case that if you don’t follow those criteria, you’re morally wrong. For Widdows, beauty isn’t even about appearing attractive or alluring. It’s about social, ethical conformity.

In our interview, Widdows used the term “the imagined self.” This is a future, better version of ourselves that we all want to become. It’s the slimmer, fitter, richer, happier version of ourselves further down the road. And somewhere over the past century or so, we’ve started to think of beauty as the gateway to all these other ideals. If we are attractive, we’ll get the job. If we’re fitter, we’ll get more friends. If we’re smooth, firm, thin, and young, we’ll be happy. As Widdows put it:

“The imagined self is the one that you imagine when you’ve attained the end of your weight loss regime or your beautifying regime or whatever it is. And the imagined self is both positive and negative. It’s imagining you’ll have better working habits, that you’ll become a better mother, a better daughter, that you’ll have found a great partner, or that you’ll have a better social life. You imagine all those things… and the beauty ideal is one that says that body work is virtuous work because it’s making a better you, and the better-looking you will have the better life.”

The damage of lookism

You are part of the problem. I am part of the problem. We are all part of the problem. In some way, lookism is wired into our genetics. Evolutionary psychologists make a great deal of the argument that we find certain things revolting because avoiding them is statistically beneficial in nature. These cognitive biases manifest everywhere. As Widdows puts it:

“We know that good-looking criminals get lighter sentences. We know that students get treated better if they’re attractive. And they’re not just assumed to be more sociable but also assumed to be academically cleverer. And the list goes on and on.”

Widdows’ philosophy, and her activism in bringing attention to lookism, is not so much about these psychological biases but about the social and ethical norms that allow us to openly prejudge people’s looks. She puts it like this:

“As our culture gets more visual, lookism is likely to impact even more. It’s an extreme form of discrimination, and yet one that we do very little about. For instance, appearance bullying is the most prevalent form of bullying in schools. It’s not just impactful; it’s prevalent, and yet it’s largely ignored. And there are also negative moral characteristics that we attach to looks. Being overweight is a particularly obvious one, but there are many others. And we actually do this from as young as three. Psychologists give groups of children silhouettes and ask them to attach characteristics to them. They attach characteristics such as ‘lazy,’ ‘has no friends,’ and ‘stupid’ to fat silhouettes, and ‘clever’ and ‘has friends’ to slimmer ones.”

The “digital boomerang”

If I were writing this article ten or twenty years ago, I would say, “Well, did you know that almost all the images you see online are curated, artificially doctored, or both?” But this is 2025, and it would be patronizing to assume you didn’t know this. People have selfie faces and their best angles. Almost all apps will give you the option to add more filters. Digital editing software automates airbrushing at the click of a button. Most smartphones will add a filter automatically when taking a photo. If you ever compare a photo taken on a photographer’s camera to one taken on a smartphone, you’ll see the difference.

But Widdows pointed out something odd. Even though most people know how artificial the online world is, we still try to live up to its artificial expectations. We know social media is not true to life, yet we still want that life. Widdows puts it like this:

“All the empirical evidence tells us that digital literacy does nothing to reduce the power of the online image. In fact, it may even make it worse. Counterintuitively, the more you know about how selfies are doctored and the work that goes into producing that perfect Instagram post, the more likely you are to compare yourself to it and feel inadequate.

This is one of the reasons why it’s so problematic that academics have been slow to get involved in creating relevant data sets. As a result, we’ve ended up with governmental policies and interventions that are actually counterproductive and have negative effects. For instance, we used to say, ‘Why don’t we label images to indicate that this woman’s legs have been lengthened and the cellulite removed?’ But what actually happens is that the labels, for whatever reason, make you more attuned to the image and increase your desire to achieve that look.

So, psychologists are now referring to this as the ‘Boomerang Effect.’ The more aware we are and the more time we spend online, the more likely we are to feel the urge to attain that perfect image—even though we know it’s an illusion, and nobody looks like their Instagram.”

And so, we return to the mirror, knowing full well that the reflection is distorted yet unable to look away. Beauty was once an aesthetic preference but is now a moral imperative. It’s a duty we perform with each filtered photo and curated pose. We know the game is rigged, yet we keep playing — because, somewhere deep down, we still believe the prize is real.