Beauty Through the Ages

This post will detail how our perception of beauty has changed throughout the years.

The Renaissance

Painters like da Vinci immortalized the beauty of natural looking women. These paintings are famous today, and still viewed as beautiful, yet women who resemble those in the paintings - walking pieces of art - are NOT. There needs to be a change.

Now for a more modern approach, I'll start with the 1950s.

Marilyn Monroe was considered the world's first true modern sex symbol, and she exists on posters still today. She was a size 14. She was a truly beautiful woman. What happened to bodies like this on calendars?


In the 60s, however, things changed with the introduction of fashion models into the mainstream culture. Artists like Andy Warhol used pencil-thin women in his movies and artwork (although he actually did a few pieces of Marilyn herself, he was using her to demonstrate pop culture, not feminine beauty). And the most famous model of that decade was Twiggy - whose kohl-rimmed eyes and stick straight hair started a revolution among girls of the decade.

The eighties and nineties brought with them a "health craze" that went a little too far. The kind of perfect, muscular toned bodies shown on the cover of health and fitness magazines were too unreachable for most women, and those decades were characterized also by eating disorders and mental health issues in general becoming more public.

This is Cindy Crawford, one of the most famous supermodels of all time. She was a somewhat healthy size 6 when this photo was taken. While her toned figure is near impossible to duplicate, it has nothing on what the new millennium had to offer.

The 2000s brought widespread use of the internet, which had horrible effects for body image and exposure to negative images in general. In the early years of the new millennium, several celebrities admitted to succumbing to eating disorders:  Scarlet Pomers, MaryKate Olsen, Nicole Richie, and Victoria "Posh" Spice, all shown below, to name a few.

 

The downhill trend is obvious, but it's possible to stop it. What we need is more blogs like this, and less pro-anorexic sites. Along with making this blog for my senior project, I have a personal goal to find pro-ana sites and comment them with the link to this page - I need more followers, and I hope the images and words I put out there for them will maybe make a difference or mean something to girls who need help.