“Recognize the beauty in your authentic self”
For this week’s blog post, I will be looking into Africa’s beauty standards, and this involves many countries in Africa. Doing my research on Africa’s beauty standards I have found many different ideas due to many differences in cultures within Africa. An example of this is that in Kenya stretched earlobes and a shaved head is a beauty standard. In the article “What men find attractive in different parts of the world” mentions that members of the Masai tribe in Africa are “known for their practice of wearing heavy jewelry made of stones or elephant tusks to stretch their earlobes over time” The larger and more elongated the earlobes are the more attractive they are. This was really interesting to me because it is bringing a different aspect of beauty which involves culture, rather than the typical thin, long hair, typical “beauty standard”. Another interesting cultural beauty standard in Africa is Lip stretching. In the same article mentioned previously, it was said that to a Musuri or Suri woman in Ethiopia lip stretching signifies “female maturity” which means that she has reached a child-bearing age. I think it is very unique and honestly very intriguing that so many unusual modifications to the body can be so attractive to another culture and country because it means more than beauty, like in this case it means maturity and it does not sexualize the women. I also came about some more research on beauty standards in Africa. In an article called “African beauty embrace your Hips”, it was mentioned what traditional African beauty standards were. It was said that “Traditional African beauty celebrates a woman’s curvy yet voluptuous figure”, you can contrast this to the typical beauty standard of being thin as a beauty standard. When I read this I thought about people who come to the United States already accepting their body whether big or small, and having to get that beauty “taken” away from you because of the beauty standards the United States can have. Another beauty standard that the article mentioned was body painting. Body painting by using chalk and red ocher mixed with animal fat or water to create the paint. They said that “body painting teaches a girl to attract men in the hopes of finding a suitable husband, and the body painting honors the human form in seeing it as a blank canvas to prepare it for various stages in life, like during courtship rituals”. I have seen many pictures of women with body painting and it truly is beautiful with all the colors and again it is a very unique way of representing a beauty standard. I compared this to getting tattoos and marking your body to symbolize many important thing to an individual. Overall, looking into the beauty standards of Africa, I appreciate the culture aspect of it. As we have learned in class, culture bring a lot and makes up who a person is and how the society of that country is. I think we have to respect and take into consideration that people come from different cultures and what they think is beauty can be different from other cultures. Social media and men should not be the only thing defining beauty, culture, women, life experiences, character, should represent beauty. I think sometimes we let materialistic things get in the way of us seeing how truly beautiful we are. There shouldn’t be standards when it comes to being beautiful because everyone is beautiful in their own way.
https://www.thelist.com/40387/men-think-attractive-different-parts-world/
Beauty Standards around the world 