Although beauty may only be skin deep throughout history, women have worked very hard to attain it. They've starved themselves painfully bound their feet, inserted plates into their lips, spent countless hours under hair dryers in front of mirrors, and beneath tanning lights and opted for breast reduction or enlargement operations. we characterize periods of history by a specific look or ideal of beauty. Often these relate to broader cultural happenings, such as today's emphasis on fitness and toned bodies. A look at US history reveals a succession of dominant ideals. For example, in sharp contrast to today's emphasis on health and vigor in the early 1800s it was fashion to appear delicate to the point of looking ill.

The poet john Keats described the ideal woman of that time as quote, a milk white lamb that bleeds for man's protection. Other past books include the voluptuous lusty woman that Lillian Russell made popular, the athletic Gibson Girl of the 1890s and the small boyish flapper of the 1920s, exemplified by the Silent Movie Actress Clara Bow. Marilyn Monroe died in 1962. But she represents a cultural ideal of beauty that persists to this day. In much of the 19th century, the desirable waistline for us women was 18 inches. I circumcised That required the use of course, it's pulled so tight that they routinely caused headaches, fainting spells, and possibly even the uterine and spinal disorders that were common among women at the time.

Although modern women are not quite as straight laced, many still endure such indignities as high heels, body waxing, eye lifts, and liposuction. In addition to the millions that women spend on cosmetics, clothing, health clubs and fashion magazines. These practices remind us that rightly or wrongly, the desire to conform to current standards of beauty is alive and well. Mattel's Barbie doll has come under fire for many years from feminists for promoting a very unrealistic standard of beauty. And the company has actually made some dramatic changes to the doll in very recent years. Here's what you see here is a project that was done by a college student.

She took a traditional Barbie doll and extrapolated the measurements to a regular sized woman. And you can see here that Barbies body measurements, if she came to life as a real life human, are not exactly realistic. As we've seen the ideal body type of Western women changes over time. Check out portraits of models from several hundred years ago by Bob Celli and others to appreciate by just how much these changes periodically caused us to redefine sexual dimorphic markers. those aspects of the body that distinguish between the sexes. The first part of the 1990s saw the emergence of the controversial wave look in which successful Models most notably Kate Moss, had bodies that resembled those of young boys.

Using heights and weights from winners of the Miss America Pageant. Nutrition experts concluded that many beauty queens were in the undernourished range. In the 1920s beauty contestants had a body mass index in the range now considered normal that is 20 to 25. Since then, an increasing number of winners have had indexes under 18.5, which is the World Health Organization standard for undernutrition.