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I think everyone has heard about the recent change in Barbie dolls over the past few years. The brand Mattel is now producing Barbies that look like REAL women, this is major for women of all ages. This article goes over the recent changes the Barbie has under gone, its past and the effects of the new changes. The recent changes in barbie have been very positive for young girls especially, and has heavily affect the rest of the female population in the world. I believe this signifies true change in beauty standards, and will hopefully set a healthier precedent for young children that play with these dolls(Dockterman, n.d.).

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Inside the biggest change in barbie's 57-year history-and what it says about American beauty ideals

Part 1
Barbie's dress won't fit.

I'm sitting in a bright pink room at Mattel's headquarters in El Segundo, Calif., playing with a Barbie that only 20 people in the world know exists. Her creation has been kept so secret that the designers code-named the endeavor Project Dawn so that even their spouses wouldn't be tipped off to her existence.

Like every girl who has ever played with the most popular toy in history, I yank her clothes off and try to put on a new dress. It's a blue summery frock, cinched tightly at the waist with a black ribbon. I try to tug it over her head, but the waistline gets stuck at her shoulders, her blond mane peeking out from the neckline. "Try going feet first," the lead designer suggests, and I do. No good. Her plump bottom gets stuck in the same spot. Yes, plump. Barbie's got a new body. Three new bodies, actually: petite, tall and curvy, in Mattel's exhaustively debated lexicon, and beginning Jan. 28 they will be sold alongside the original busty, thin-waisted form on Barbie.com. They'll all be called Barbie, but it's the curvy one-with meat on her thighs and a protruding tummy and behind-that marks the most startling change to the most infamous body in the world.

It's a massive risk for Mattel. Barbie is more than just a doll. The brand does $1 billion in sales across more than 150 countries annually, and 92% of American girls ages 3 to 12 have owned a Barbie, thanks in part to her affordable $10 price tag. She's been the global symbol of a certain kind of American beauty for generations, with brand recognition that's up there with Mickey Mouse. M.G. Lord, a Barbie biographer, once said she was designed "to teach women what-for better or worse-is expected of them in society."

The company hopes that the new dolls, with their diverse body types, along with the new skin tones and hair textures introduced last year, will more closely reflect their young owners' world. But the initiative could also backfire-if it's not too late altogether. Adding three new body types now is sure to irritate someone: just picking out the terms petite, tall and curvy, and translating them into dozens of languages without causing offense, took months. And like me, girls will strip curvy Barbie and try to put original Barbie's clothes on her or swap the skirts of petite and tall. Not everything will Velcro shut. Fits will be thrown, exasperated moms will call Mattel. The company is setting up a separate help line just to deal with Project Dawn complaints.

But staying the course was not an option. Barbie sales plummeted 20% from 2012 to 2014 and continued to fall last year. A line of toys designed to teach girls to build, Lego Friends, helped boost Lego above Mattel as the biggest toy company in the world in 2014. Then Hasbro won the Disney Princess business away from Mattel, just as Elsa from the film Frozen dethroned Barbie as the most popular girl's toy. The estimated revenue loss to Mattel from Elsa and the other Disney Princesses is $500 million.

Meanwhile, American beauty ideals have evolved: the curvaceous bodies of Kim Kardashian West, Beyoncé and Christina Hendricks have become iconic, while millennial feminist leaders like Lena Dunham are deliberately baring their un-Barbie-like figures onscreen, fueling a movement that promotes body acceptance. In this environment, a new generation of mothers favor what they perceive as more empowering toys for their daughters. Elsa might be just as blond and waif-thin as Barbie, but she comes with a backstory of strength and sisterhood. "The millennial mom is a small part of our consumer base," concedes Evelyn Mazzocco, head of the Barbie brand, "but we recognize she's the future."

Part 2
The board behind Mazzocco's desk is filled with words like out of touch, materialistic, not diverse.

She tacked them up shortly after she took over Barbie in 2014, part of a massive shake-up at Mattel during which president and COO Richard Dickson put people with creative backgrounds at the head of several brands, hoping they would come up with more-innovative solutions to Mattel's sinking sales. The first thing Mazzocco did in that role was survey Barbie's haters.

"I wanted to remind myself every time I came to work about the reality of what is going on with the brand," says Mazzocco, who has three daughters whom she uses as her "own little focus group." Not that she needed the reminder: she routinely receives hate mail and even death threats over Barbie's body.

Barbie has courted controversy since her birth. Her creator, Ruth Handler, based Barbie's body on a German doll called Lilli, a prostitute gag gift handed out at bachelor parties. Her proportions were designed accordingly. When Handler introduced Barbie (named after her daughter Barbara) in 1959 at the New York Toy Fair, her male competitors laughed her out of the room: nobody, they insisted, would want to play with a doll with breasts.

Still, Barbie's sales took off, but by 1963 women were protesting the same body men had ridiculed. That year, a teen Barbie was sold with a diet book that recommended simply, "Don't eat." When a Barbie with pre-programmed phrases uttered, "Math class is tough," a group called the Barbie Liberation Organization said the doll taught girls that it was more important to be pretty than smart. They switched out Barbie's voice box with that of GI Joe so that the blonde cried, "Vengeance is mine," while the macho warrior enthused, "Let's plan our dream wedding."

Mattel argues that the criticism was misplaced-that Barbie was a businesswoman in 1963, an astronaut in 1965 and a surgeon in 1973 when 9% of all doctors were women. "Our brand represents female empowerment," argues Dickson. "It's about choices. Barbie had careers at a time when women were restricted to being just housewives. Ironically, our critics are the very people who should embrace us."

Mattel has also long claimed that Barbie has no influence on girls' body image, pointing to whisper-thin models and even moms as the source of the dissatisfaction that too many young girls feel about their bodies. A handful of studies, however, suggest that Barbie does have at least some influence on what girls see as the ideal body. The most compelling, a 2006 study published in the journal Developmental Psychology, found that girls exposed to Barbie at a young age expressed greater concern with being thin, compared with those exposed to other dolls.

But it was only when moms started voting with their dollars that Mattel had to reassess these criticisms. In the mid-2000s Barbie faced her first serious competition after years of maintaining about 90% market share of the doll sector. Bratz, the edgy, bug-eyed dolls with their own smartphones and lip gloss, were "eating Barbie's lunch in the older-girl demographic, and Disney Princess was chomping away at the younger-girl demographic," explains Dickson. "Barbie was having an identity crisis."

At first, this wasn't a major problem for Mattel. Dickson was brought in in 2000 to expand the Barbie brand from dolls to apparel, TV shows and gaming. That's when Barbie got her own interactive website. (She also has her own show that streams on Netflix.) The Barbie brand's sales went up even as the doll's sales sank. And Mattel as a whole prospered. The company was producing the Disney Princess dolls through a licensing deal, and to combat the Bratz problem, it created its own line of cutting-edge dolls, Monster High.

But in 2012, Barbie global sales dropped 3%. They dropped another 6% in 2013 and 16% in 2014. And the dominance of Frozen's Elsa signals more trouble ahead. Even two years after the film's release, the allure of Frozen hasn't abated. At a Los Angeles Target, I locate Barbie in the toy aisle, beaming down at me from her dream house (pink convertible sold separately). On the next shelf over sits Elsa in a box that invites you to press a button to hear her sing. I press. As the doll begins to belt out the girl-power anthem "Let It Go," children-girls and boys-come running from all directions screaming, dancing, one explaining to her mom why they need yet another variation of the Elsa doll in their house. I make a hasty retreat as the mother begins to look around for the idiot who started playing "Let It Go" in the toy aisle during the holiday season.

Therein lies Barbie's problem. As much as Mattel has tried to market her as a feminist, Barbie's famous figure has always overshadowed her business outfits. At her core, she's just a body, not a character, a canvas upon which society can project its anxieties about body image. "Barbie has all this baggage," says Jess Weiner, a branding expert and consultant who has worked with Dove, Disney and Mattel to create empowering messaging for girls. "Her status as an empowered woman has been lost."

Part 3
With all that in mind, Kim Culmone, head of design, posed a challenge to her team:

If you could design Barbie today, how would you make her a reflection of the times? Out of that came changing Barbie's face to have less makeup and look younger, giving her articulated ankles so she could wear flats as well as heels, giving her new skin tones to add diversity and then of course changing the body. While curvy Barbie's hips, thighs and calves are visibly larger than before, from the waist up she is less Jessica Rabbit than she is pear-shaped. Mattel refuses to discuss the actual proportions of the new dolls or how it came to decide on them.

What's clear in listening to the team discuss the project is that every step was taken on tiptoe. "It's a personal issue because almost every woman has owned a Barbie, and every woman has some relationship with or opinion about Barbie," says Culmone. During one meeting, designers, marketers and researchers fixated on the shoe problem. There will now be two Barbie shoe sizes, one for curvy and tall and another for original and petite. "We can't label them 1, 2, because someone will read into that as saying one's better than the other," Barbie designer and former Project Runway contestant Robert Best explains. "Plus, we have to put the Barbie branding on every single object, and the shoes are so tiny." They finally land on a B for one shoe size and Barbie's face on the other. Moms will have to puzzle out which is which when they find a miniature stiletto jammed between their couch cushions.

Indeed, the additional bodies are a logistical nightmare. Mattel will sell the dolls exclusively on Barbie.com at first while it negotiates with retailers for extra shelf space to make room for the new bodies and their clothes alongside the original. There are a seemingly infinite number of combinations of hair texture, hair cut and color, body type and skin tone. And then there's the issue of how to package the dolls. Mothers surveyed in Mattel focus groups expressed concern over giving the new dolls to their daughter or a friend of their daughter's. What if a sensitive mom reads into the gift of a curvy doll a comment on her daughter's weight? Mattel decided to sell the dolls in sets to avoid this problem, but then it had to figure out which dolls to sell together to optimize diversity and marketability.

"Yes, some people will say we are late to the game," says Mazzocco. "But changes at a huge corporation take time."

Part 4
"Hello, I'm a fat person, fat, fat, fat,"

A 6-year-old girl giving voice for the first time to curvy Barbie sings in a testing room at Mattel's headquarters. Her playmates erupt in laughter.

When an adult comes into the room and asks her if she sees a difference between the dolls' bodies, she modifies her language. "This one's a little chubbier," she says. Girls in other sessions are similarly careful about labels. "She's, well, you know," says an 8-year-old as she uses her hands to gesture a curvier woman. A shy 7-year-old refuses to say the word fat to describe the doll, instead spelling it out, "F, a, t."

"I don't want to hurt her feelings," she says a little desperately.

As always, Barbie acts as a Rorschach test for the girls who play with her-and the adults who evaluate her. It's a testament to anti-bullying curriculums in elementary schools that none of the girls would use words like fat in front of an adult, which Barbie's research team says wasn't true even three years ago. Still, the girls learning the ways of political correctness do not as wholeheartedly embrace the new dolls as their moms.

"We see it a lot. The adult leaves the room and they undress the curvy Barbie and snicker a little bit," says Tania Missad, who runs the research team for Mattel's girls portfolio. "For me, it's these moments where it just really sets in how important it is we do this. Over time I would love it if a girl wouldn't snicker and just think of it as another beautiful doll."

It's a sign that even kids as young as 6 or 7 are already conditioned for a particular silhouette in their dolls, and it highlights Mattel's challenge. Mazzocco reflects on her experience with her daughters (two Barbie fans, one not) when she talks about the diversity imperative at the brand. "I do all kinds of things for my kids that they don't like or understand, from telling them to do their homework to eating their vegetables," she says. "This is very similar. It's my responsibility to make sure that they have inclusivity in their lives even if it doesn't register for them."

Many of the mothers in the four focus groups that Mattel allows me to observe agree with the direction Mattel is taking. And they are, after all, the ones who buy the dolls. Though young moms might be the most vocal on social media when it comes to Barbie's body, Mattel's extensive surveys show that moms across the country care about diversity in terms of color and body, regardless of age, race or socioeconomic position. (The majority of the women in the focus groups I watched were middle class and African American or Hispanic.)

"She's cute thick," offers one mom who says she has a 19-year-old son and two daughters, 3 and 5. "I have the hardest time finding clothes that are fitted and look good. It's like if you're bigger, you have to wear a sack. But she doesn't look like that." A mom sporting a tattoo says that she prefers buying My Little Pony toys to any sort of dolls to avoid the body-image issue altogether, and other mothers nod in agreement. Most say the new Barbie types would make them more likely to buy Barbie.
What I Learned Watching Moms and Kids Meet Curvy Barbie
Some say Mattel didn't go far enough. "I wish that she were curvier," one woman wearing her uniform from her job at a restaurant complains. "There are shapes that are curvier and still are beautiful. My daughter definitely has curves, and I would want to give her a doll like that. It's a start, I guess."

And despite the girls who thought the curvy doll looked fat, most of the kids in the groups I observe choose their favorite doll or the doll that looks most like them based on hair, not body shape. A curvy, blue-haired doll that many girls dub Katy Perry is by far the most popular. But when asked which doll is Barbie, the girls invariably point to a blonde.

The idea that all these different dolls-none of whom look alike-can all be Barbie is confusing to moms too. "I brought my daughter to a Christmas-tree lighting with Santa and Barbie the other day," says a mom in one of the focus groups. "If a black woman or a redheaded woman or a heavyset woman had shown up, my daughter would have been like, 'Where's Barbie?'" If Mattel takes away everything that makes Barbie an icon, is she still that icon? Companies work decades to create the sort of brand recognition that Barbie has. When people around the world close their eyes and think of Barbie, they see a specific body. If that body changes, Barbie could lose that status. Worse still, some customers may not like the new version. Too bad for them.

"Ultimately, haters are going to hate," Dickson says. "We want to make sure the Barbie lovers love us more-and perhaps changing the people who are negative to neutral. That would be nice."

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Inside the biggest change in barbie's 57-year history-and what it says about American beauty ideals Part 1 Barbie's dress won't fit. I'm sitting in a bright pink room at Mattel's headquarters in El Segundo, Calif., playing with a Barbie that only 20 people in the world know exists.

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How the cosmetic industry is changing... 

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How the cosmetic industry is changing... 

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This article covers the steps forward the cosmetic industry is making and the less than stellar moves of the past and present. It is thanks to social media that consumers are able to provide feedback so easily. Unlike the all too close past, where providing feedback was like sending a signal into space, just to never get a reply. Feedback is provided to brands quickly after launch of new products, this way the company can make corrections and make additions. Social media has the power to make waves for these cosmetic brands and these brands recognize that in this day and age it is sink or swim for them. Less than 10 years ago there were very limited shade ranges for people to purchase, the majority of brands having a large portion of shades to offer to people with fair skin and some medium shades. This solidified the belief that fair skin was a more desirable attribute, I would also like to note that many of the models in these cosmetic brands were Caucasian (Hope, 2016).

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Three years ago, I made a trip to Sephora with one specific purpose in mind: to search for the perfect foundation. Surely, some mystical brown shade existed at the elusive nexus of "good" and "right." Having spent most of my life wearing solely mascara and a resting bitch face, this was my first time hunting for just one decent cream or powder amid the cascading options available for skin tones ranging from white to very white to kinda brown.

Overwhelmed, I studied the stacks of Lancôme and Yves Saint Laurent compacts in Sephora's Flatiron location and recalled, in my head, the dozens of semi-empty foundation bottles my mom used to have scattered atop her dresser. But here's where my story takes a detour from the déjà vu feeling of helplessness that's become a staple in beauty trend pieces.

To avoid certain disappointment, I brought along a friend with a similar dark complexion as mine who also happens to be a beauty blogger. Alone in that makeup funhouse, I would've imploded for sure. My friend walked up to the Make Up Forever section, plucked two High Definition bottles of foundation, tested the back of my hand, and applied the best match to my face. Never mind that I ended up ditching the idea of foundation within two weeks; I found the right shade in minutes, but only with the help of a person who looked like me. That friend works for L'Oreal Paris now.

The problem I and many other women of color face on a regular basis is surviving that experience again and again, in an industry where makeup is predominantly default white. This is not a new dilemma at all, as much as it is a constant cycle of exclusion and expected inefficacy with occasional outliers. Not nearly enough experts exist who, like my brilliant friend, have makeup foundation down to a science or, like me, have enough anecdotal evidence and personal horror stories to recognize the specific needs of black and brown women.

Over the years, there've been articles either highlighting the beauty industry's exclusion or pronouncing the dawn of a new era-an illusion of variety galore in beauty aisles. These stories exist in the form of essays about The Search for products or predictions of a positive shift that, in real time, tends to arrive at a dead end. These stories pop up every so often without fail, creating a dominant narrative of the past few years that the beauty industry fails us.

In 2006, Village Voice wondered, "Has the cosmetics industry really come to recognize women of color as a target audience?" In 2014, the New York Times published "Makeup That Addresses the Many Shades of Women"-a piece about the industry's stunted growth-while a Los Angeles Times piece declared: "New lines for women of color broaden the spectrum of beauty." 2015 saw similar reported cycles of struggle and progress: Racked's "Is the Makeup Industry Finally Embracing Diversity?" highlighted beauty's small leaps, as did NPR's roundtable "Cosmetics Companies Play Catch-Up With Diversity Of Customer" and Bloomberg's "The World's Biggest Cosmetics Brands Are Finally Courting Minorities." Cosmopolitan.com published "Why Are Women of Color Still Having Trouble Finding Foundation?" in which Andrea Arterberry wrote about her disappointing beauty trials: "While there were dozens of shades, not one suited my olive undertones. I knew from years of trial and error that, once applied, those pale shades would give me that 'trashy ashy' look."

This year again, in February, Refinery29 published "How The Beauty Industry Has Failed Black Women," in which Taylor Bryant wrote: "Brands are also increasingly marketing to Black women. But it's not enough to slap Lupita or Kerry or Zendaya's face on your ad and call it a day - you have to also deliver with the product."

Any broad sense of optimism seems to continually be met with frustration. The immediate psychological response to the deficiency is a desire to seek solace in minority-owned brands that cater to us, and to cast away those that neglect us. (It's all the more tempting now, with people like Solange pledging support of black-owned businesses as a means of protest.) Still, it's hard to ignore the legitimate need for comparable mainstream (and affordable) makeup options that make consumer life a little easier. The status quo seems to shift only to an extent, but lately the largest makeup companies have attempted broader selections, celebrity collaborations and more targeted marketing.

In 2014, L'Oreal bought the black-owned business Carol's Daughter. In 2015, Lupita Nyong'o was named beauty ambassador for Lancôme, and CoverGirl launched a line with the stars of Empire in March. Queen Latifah has her CoverGirl Queen collection. Rihanna has M.A.C. (which also launched a Future Forward line this year featuring Tinashe, Dej Loaf and Lion Babe). Angela Bassett is creating a makeup line with Dr. Barbara Sturm. And at BeautyCon on July 9, Kelly Rowland promoted Face, a makeup collection for darker skin tones that she's creating with her makeup artist Sheika Daley. Rowland told Essence, "We're starting off with lashes and then we're going to have it grow for all women. But definitely making sure we have our chocolate girls covered. Gotta get the chocolate girls in there!"

In doing this story, my goal was to find reasons for the lack of diverse shades and tones in the beauty industry-whether scientific or experiential-that might explain the issue beyond the crutch of pure ignorance. (To clarify, I'm focusing specifically on black and brown skin of various ethnicities, and on makeup, particularly foundations and concealers since they're meant to blend with our natural skin tones, but also lipsticks and blushes that need to address darker pigments.) I was also curious how beauty bloggers have positively served the industry, under the presumption that social media-the most direct consumer feedback-has clearly made the establishment more accountable. I found that while the imbalance appears to be shrinking toward progress, personal experience tends to trump market trends and, as always, the internet is the ultimate equalizer.

It's not as simple as creating more shades. There's an issue of ignorance and the issue of marketing. The problem most of these trend stories hit on is the vexing intersection of market behavior and life experience that's difficult to navigate. In other words, the idea that there may be more shades available but there isn't one "for me." In 2013, the personal finance service Mint estimated that women spend $15,000 on makeup in a lifetime; a 2009 report found that the annual figure black women spent on beauty products was $7.5 billion. Even as beauty companies offer more, the aisles seem to remain drastically not in our favor.

The paper trail of misery for black women in the beauty market is long and running. By the 1940s, makeup lines for black women were more prevalent, but beauty companies still focused many of their advertising efforts on appealing to black women through the use of skin lightening products slyly promoted as blemish creams.

In the book Style and Status: Selling Beauty to African American Women, 1920-1975, author Susannah Walker writes: "As in the 1920s and 1930s, bleaching cream advertisements mixed blatant claims for the skin-lightening properties of the product with assertions that the cream was really for overall improvement of skin tone and texture." The marketing in the '50s had become savvier and less about portraying dark skin as "ugly and desirable," Walker notes.

But this emphasizes an important point that American black beauty and consumerism has inextricably been tied to the social and political climate of the moment, and to power dynamics. If, as Walker writes, advertisers at the time "did not see black people as affluent enough to warrant special advertising attention or sophisticated enough to respond to product marketing," then it explains why products for black women weren't a consideration to begin with and why niche black companies thrived.

The book also cites black publications as an essential source for makeup advice-nightclub singer Norma Shephard told Our World magazine in 1946, "I don't have to tell you what a job it is to have to match face powder to Negro complexion tones"; the mag also wrote that "suitable shades are about to be packaged and placed on the market." Even as progress was seemingly being made, the industry continued to report setbacks.

The November 1975 issue of Black Enterprise has an article titled "The Beauty Business Is Still Bullish." The piece mentions Revlon's then new line of foundation, lipstick and blush for black women called The Polished Ambers. It notes Clairol's launch of "two shades of makeup tailored to darker skin tones" (wow, two). It also references the black beauty market boom of the 1960s (post-riots), citing white-owned beauty businesses that made products for black skin, like Posner's and Flori Roberts, which launched to compete alongside the black-owned and dominant Johnson Products, Fashion Fair and the like, alongside celebrity lines like jazz singer Nancy Wilson's Cosmetics for Beautiful Ladies of Colour, created in 1971.

"If you're a cosmetics company that's coming to market and you have the old school six to eight shades of foundations, then you're behind the times."

Years later, in its August 1978 issue, Black Enterprise wrote about the dilemma of mainstream beauty companies beginning to pursue black women's pockets. To probably no one's surprise, it was the power of the black dollar that brought diversity to the beauty industry, not a push for inclusion. The unfortunate side effect of companies widening their selections for the sake of profits was that it threatened the livelihoods of black-owned businesses, much to the frustration of entrepreneurs like Johnson Products founder George Johnson. Adamant against white capital interest in the black beauty market, he said in a speech to beauticians, according to Black Enterprise:

"White people, for the most part, ignored this industry as long as they thought it was a nickel and dime business. We were overlooked or else looked upon as just 'nigger business.' It was too little for them to be involved with or concerned about. Today, they are making strong efforts to take over entry level of the kinky-hair business. They want the manufacturing business. They want the beauty shop operations. And they want the beauty jobber business."

The Black Enterprise article concluded that "the future of the black beauty market seems to be getting brighter," which sounds exactly like the above-mentioned articles from the past three years.

Decades later, the future was in fact brighter-or rather, darker. In 1990, Maybelline-then America's second most profitable cosmetics brand behind CoverGirl-started Shades of You, a makeup line for black women. "In the '90s, different general market brands said, 'let's create some brand that works for the multicultural audience,'" Karen Chambers, Iman Cosmetics' director of product development, told me. "I don't know what happened after those early attempts. I don't know if they didn't quite get the mix right or didn't quite get the audience loyalty that they were hoping for, but most of those brands went away." (Shades of You appears to have been discontinued in the mid-to-late '90s).

In a Black Enterprise article from June 1991 about Maybelline, beauty expert Alfred Fornay told the magazine, "The makeup market for women of color hasn't met its potential compared to the white market." Fortune reported in 1994:

When in 1990 Maybelline Inc. launched Shades of You, a mass-market cosmetics line for women of darker hues, no minorities worked in marketing at the company or in middle or upper management. When Maybelline's parent, Wasserstein Perella, became aware of the situation, a few people of color were hired. Shades of You is a winner, with about 35% of the $100-million-a-year ethnic cosmetics market, and CEO Robert Hiatt asserts, "It is not the makeup of our management that is important; it is paying attention to the market and customers. We don't keep track of the number of minorities or other groups in the company."

Hiatt's tone-deaf response ignored the issue that a majority-white beauty team is exactly what contributes to the problem. You can see how that thinking trickled down. In his book Desegregating the Dollar: African American Consumerism in the Twentieth Century, Robert E. Weems describes Shades of You as a "watershed moment for African American female consumers." He writes:

This represented the first time a major cosmetic company had created a mass-market line for African American women. Still, Maybelline's historic maneuver appeared to have been primarily motivated by a desire for profit, rather than by a strong commitment to serving the needs of black female consumers.

Maybelline and others made money in the black market-Estee Lauder had a similarly targeted line, Prescriptives All Skins, which, Weems writes, "attracted nearly fifty thousand new black customers during its first year." In 1990, the line offered a broader range of foundation options-115 shades, according to its site. M.A.C. (founded in 1984) and Bobbi Brown Cosmetics (which launched in 1991 as Bobbi Brown Essentials) are two names I've seen consistently praised for their wide range of products for different skin tones, primarily because they were founded by makeup artists familiar with diverse tones.

What changed from between the '90s and now is easy to figure out. Because so much of beauty is based on personal experience, beauty blogging has become crucial. When I spoke to Patrice Yursik, founder of Afrobella, a beauty site for women of color, she recalled how few diverse products were available in 2006 when she started her site.

"There were not a lot of mainstream beauty products offering more than, let's say, eight shades of foundations. It's been so beautiful to watch all of those things change," she says. "At this point, if you're a cosmetics company that's coming to market and you have the old school six to eight shades of foundations, then you're behind the times, you're not in step with the rest of your peers in the industry and you will feel that backlash online. Social media has allowed the consumer to be so directly outspoken in their opinions and their needs in a way that it really wasn't possible."

Now, of course, the consumer knows more about makeup than the brands who make them. Where before the average black beauty user might have gained most of their beauty insight from magazines like Essence or Ebony (mainstream pubs barely addressed women of color), it can't be overstated how much beauty blogs have democratized the business, allowing women of various shades a voice and a seat.

Even though bloggers have, in turn, become strange bedfellows with brands looking to exploit their popularity, the bloggers are still the people consumers trust way more than conglomerates. WWD wrote in February:

The sea change is creating a new generation of consumers, a swelling group of young women who devour beauty content, determinedly search for details about products they covet, itch to try new brands and crave great scores. Increasingly, brands are responding by unleashing newness at warp speed, solidifying relationships with social media stars, ambushing trends and quickening the pace of their marketing efforts. With social media inflaming desire for products, it's a kill-or-be-killed environment in the beauty business, and the kills can be immediate and very, very big.

"Old school department store brands are scrambling to try to figure out their footing," says Afrobella's Yursik. "You look at someone like Kylie Jenner and you see the success of the Lip Kit and you're like, wait a minute the whole beauty game has changed. You no longer have to wait for this partnership with this brand that will bless you and say that you are worthy. You can create something that has your own name on it."

It also presents a more visible landscape to submit feedback. Around 2008, L'Oreal was on the receiving end of criticism over ads where Beyoncé's skin appeared lightened. Last year, Clutch reported controversy over a Black Opal Cosmetics tweet that implied it wasn't a brand designed for black women, despite its origins.

(In an email to me, the company's VP of marketing, Maya Brown, referred to its global expansion and stated that their customers' skin "ranges from a very fair beige tone to a very deep coffee tone.")

In February, British consumers dragged Maybelline over its Dream Velvet foundation launch, which offered one shade for darker tones but used model Jourdan Dunn's face in an ad. BuzzFeed reported:

After BuzzFeed News contacted Maybelline UK about why only six shades were available to buy in the UK, a spokesperson said they had plans to release Jourdan's shade "in the next few months."

Again in June, BareMinerals unveiled a new line of concealers called Complexions Rescue, which featured 16 shades, with only two for darker skin tones. Criticism poured in online, a vast difference from years ago when consumers had to speak into a void. "Social media has done an awesome job of replacing what back in the day we would use as focus groups. We have live information from consumers," says Chambers, from Iman Cosmetics. "The consumers have been very vocal about brands who've put beautiful models and celebrities of colors in the advertising, but then the shades weren't right. There's a fabulous level of education out there. We have consumers writing in, like, 'Are you getting your palm oil from the Amazon?'"

In comparison, because of its diverse options, Colour Pop Cosmetics-which posts swatches for different skin tones as part of its product launches-became what people call an online sensation, based largely on word of mouth traffic. There's also Essence BeautyBox and Doobop.com, both beauty compilation services that target women of color.

"We've certainly seen more mainstream companies attempt to provide a wider range of shades, but there's a lot of room to grow," says Brandi Shipp, VP and general manager of Essence BeautyBox. "Many just check a box and have a couple of darker shades, but we know there are so many different skin tones and undertones in our community. You need more than just a few darker shades than usual."

"The beauty industry has faced major scientific challenges in formulating foundations for medium to deeper skin tones."

An obvious reason for the lack of options is that fewer or, worse, zero people of color work inside the makeup labs where makeup is produced. While collaborating with M.A.C. on a capsule collection in 2011, Yursik says she visited their lab and was surprised with its diverse staff.

"The people in front and even the senior management might be people who reflect the brand, but the people who are actually working right there in the lab are not the people who are the skin tone of the products," says Chambers. "So sometimes there are a lot of assumptions about what will work on certain skin tones. And it just doesn't. There has to be nuances that really work."

At the same time that beauty bloggers have become central influencers-to the point of creating their own collections for brands-celebrities are aligning with brands in more substantial ways. The use of famous spokesmodels for beauty ads heightened around the '20s and '30s, when, as the book Style and Status details, "in African American beauty product advertising, the use of beautiful and sexy showgirls and blues singers was part of the larger transition from advertisements that promoted good grooming and stressed the functionality of products to those that emphasized romance and sexual attractiveness."

Lately, in place of positions as spokesmodels, as Beyoncé and Frieda Pinto do for L'Oreal Paris, celebs are promoted as ambassadors. As Neutrogena's beauty ambassador and creative consultant, Kerry Washington helped introduce shades for women with darker skin tones. It's significant that Neutrogena, as of three years ago, did not have a foundation that matched Kerry Washington's shade.

This about face is part of a long tradition of brands transforming their screw-ups into positive marketing campaigns. By blatantly advertising their diversity rather than simply doing it-with the help of popular darker skinned women in the forefront-they're hoping consumers will forgive the brand's past transgressions. "Why would Lancôme choose Lupita to be their spokesperson? That's a very specific statement and an intentional statement," says Yursik. "It's 'we really want you to know that we're doing this.'"

Chambers adds, "The celebrity factor has gotten big, so brands have said let's include celebrities as part of the brand's story. What's failed the consumer is that a lot of times the product offerings did not translate."

Essentially, A-list stars promote a product in ads but consumers looking to buy those items in person have unsatisfactory results. "You're not done once you've got a great product selection. That's the have to have," says Shipp. "It's important to have more than one brown face in an ad. You need to represent the full range of shades and skin tones and beauty processes and needs and that's not done through a single spokesperson."

Lancôme had to go so far as to create a whole new shade for Lupita Nyong'o last year, which it did under its Women of Color Lab, launched in 2013. In a rare feat, the lab is managed by a black woman, chemist Balanda Atis, who says it's a challenge for many brands to just figure out the science.

"The beauty industry has faced major scientific challenges in formulating foundations for medium to deeper skin tones," Atis wrote in an email. "The more traditional colorants used to deepen shades are limited and chemists don't always have an optimized formula architecture to allow the skin's natural tones to show through. In some cases, the formula will hide the skin's natural color instead of enhancing it. The second challenge is that they may not have the right balance of pigments in the formula-for example, too much red or yellow-to achieve the best shade."

Black Opal's Maya Brown also thinks there's a gap in education among mainstream brands about the chemistry of darker skin tones. "Many general market brands have expanded their shade palettes with offerings that are deeper than 'caramel,' which historically was the darkest shade in the line," Brown wrote in an email. "There are still opportunities to vary the mix with richer and deeper tones that cater to the blends of colors within multi-hued skin. You can't just add brown pigment to a tan shade and think you're creating a deeper tone. Multi-hued skin is more nuanced and requires an appropriate mix of colors that complement our vast shade spectrum."

In a tangible, real-world example, a black Gawker Media colleague told me she had problems finding the right shade of Urban Decay's Naked foundation. When she went shopping for it in January, nothing fit what she needed-a color between 9 and 10. She only recently discovered that the company launched six new shades in March (she has yet to shop for one) to bring its total offering to 24 shades, which they claim were "meticulously calibrated."

Simple logic and expert opinions suggests the reason black women spend so much on beauty products is consummate trial and error, as WWD noted in a 2009 piece about purchasing power. Such a high cost puts black consumers at an immediate disadvantage, especially when new products are introduced that don't account for our many shades.The latest industry-wide push is toward Korean products (the marketing of skin lighteners presents a different set of issues for Asian American women), with an emphasis on BB creams, the all-in-one "beauty balm" designed to multitask as a moisturizer, foundation and concealer.

Chambers says Iman started offering the product two years ago because "there were no brown BB creams," she says. "The trend had come out of Asia and our girls were into it and there was nothing beyond that slightly medium color. Everything was heavy and chalky."

In terms of retail, Yursek points to the significance of seeing affordable drug stores brands-she cites Milani, Jordana and NYX Cosmetics-expand their options. "There've been so many brands that came and realized, oh is that what you want as a consumer? Then we're gonna give it to you," she says. "When those came out, people were so excited just to have an eye shadow with pigment that could work for a deeper skin tone in a drugstore at a reasonably afforded price. Now, I really think it's driven so much by the needs of the consumer and through social media in a way that is subversive to the beauty industry."

Tragic beauty stories never seem to find a resolution because the answer is obvious: the makeup business needs more women of color chemists, marketers, spokesmodels and ambassadors across the board. The industry has finally-incredibly late- just started to move toward a tipping point. And it's the consumers who've largely initiated the shift by being better equipped to vocalize their demands.

"I think the decision-makers who are higher up in these old school brands have not evolved. They stay in a bubble. The bubble might be in San Francisco or New York, where you think people who've been your consumer for a long time are the only people you need to speak to," says Yursik. "Eventually, you will be told that you need to expand."

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The Makeup Industry's Frustrating Cycle of Struggle and Progress for Women of Color

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Three years ago, I made a trip to Sephora with one specific purpose in mind: to search for the perfect foundation. Surely, some mystical brown shade existed at the elusive nexus of "good" and "right."

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A shift in the cosmetic industry, Rihanna is bringing it

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A shift in the cosmetic industry, Rihanna is bringing it

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This is an ad campaign photo from the Fenty Beauty Launch. Although, at the time of launch there were few other brands that catered to darker toned consumers, it was shown that Fenty Beauty's new foundation line proved to accommodate more peoples actual shades than the other competitors. Not only did Fenty Beauty accommodate people of colour but also accommodates people who are very pail as well as those with albinism. Fenty Beauty has flipped the cosmetics industry upside down, and set a new standard. Companies that don't follow the 'new standard' do so at the risk of their own businesses failing (Singh-Kurtz, 2018).

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Modelling industry is expanding it's horizons

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Modelling industry is expanding it's horizons

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Please welcome Madeline Stuart to the international stage! This is an image of Madeline Stuart a relatively new model This young girl is opening doors for models with disabilities. Typically in modelling and on the runway we see tall extremely skinny women with flawless complexions. Madeline and other up and coming entrepreneurs of the modelling world are changing modelling and making it more inclusive for all (Ferguson, 2015).

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This article highlights the standards of beauty from the past and present. In the article they describe the slow but seemingly obvious change. Older women began to make each years selected list of 'most beautiful celebrities'. According to the author of the article, we are seeing more change to "mirror the image of society", (Berry, 2017). I interpret this as, people are beginning to seek and prefer to see more examples of what they see in normal society being depicted in what they are seeing in publications (Berry, 2017).

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Evolving standards of the 'world's most beautiful' people show we are changing

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The eye of the collective beholder may be changing for the better. At least, this is the first-glance appearance of new analysis of how beauty has changed over the past 30 years. It found there is more diversity in age and ethnicity when it comes to what we consider beautiful.

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This is an article about the recent changes in the fashion industry. Thanks to social media concerns are being heard immediately. In one such case, there was an uproar on social media because Dior had Caucasian models wearing dreadlocks but failed to demonstrate an understanding of the historical significance and the origin of dreadlocks to people of colour (Givhan, 2017).

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The fashion industry has become more diverse, more inclusive. More open. It is less them-vs.-you. It is us.

Yes, fashion still has its flaws. Designers often still have tunnel vision. The industry still makes head-smacking gaffes. There are far too many cases of profound insensitivity and cavalier cultural appropriation. (Will those Kardashians ever learn?) But in the past decade, it has opened its doors to more people of color, plus-size women, transgender women and those who simply don't fit the industry's classic definition of beauty. Most importantly, fashion is talking about diversity in more nuanced ways - and learning from its mistakes.

Two years ago, Brandice Henderson, who describes herself as a "fashion coach," was having dinner with five designers at Harlem's Red Rooster. They were all up-and-comers, lauded by major fashion magazines, who had dressed an assortment of famous women. The scene was typical for New York with one significant exception: All five of the designers were black.

This is no small thing.

Four years ago, five women walked into IMG Models and immediately impressed the company's president, Ivan Bart. One of them especially stood out. Her name was Ashley Graham and she was plus-size. But as Bart put it: "A star is a star is a star." Graham has gone on to become the rare model who is known by name well outside the insulated world of fashion. She is not a plus-size success story; she is, quite simply, a success.

This is no small thing, either.

In 2017, Vogue ran countless photo stories celebrating Hollywood stars and cultural figures, but it also published visual essays on Latinas in Los Angeles, Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority sisters, lesbian models and black servicewomen.

This is significant, too.

During the past decade, the New York fashion industry has been in upheaval over the subject of diversity, or the lack of it. The most egregious examples were on the runways. They are fashion's billboards and its proving ground - the place where designers spin out their wildest fantasies, and where the public receives its notions of fashion at its most glamorous and rarefied. And the message, in the mid-2000s, was that high-end fashion was for emaciated white teenagers.
[From 2007: Once again, white is the new white]
The ranks of editors and designers were lacking in diversity, too. There were no editors-in-chief of major fashion publications who were black. The rising generation of designers who had captured the industry's attention were mostly white - sometimes Asian, but rarely black, Latino or even female. Plus-size women were not part of the fashion conversation. And gender fluidity had yet to become an aesthetic interest.

In 2007, activist Bethann Hardison organized a "town hall" meeting to start a conversation about fashion's worsening diversity problem. In 2013, she meticulously tracked designers' hiring practices and publicized the results. The lack of inclusiveness was striking. And Hardison unflinchingly called such practices "racist."

Now, the industry looks significantly different from the days of clone-like waifs, golden-haired muses and magazine mastheads that read like the Social Register. There is greater recognition that fashion needs to change.

Last year, after designer Marc Jacobs featured models - many of them white - wearing fanciful dreadlocks in his spring 2017 runway show, social media lit up in anger because of his failure to acknowledge the hairstyle's history within black communities. Six months later, his fall 2017 show was an ode to hip-hop; he cast mostly models of color and included show notes lauding the influence of black youth.

Fashion has also had several landmark moments: A black man has been appointed editor-in-chief of British Vogue and a black woman is at the helm of Teen Vogue. Joan Smalls, who was born in Puerto Rico, became Estee Lauder's first Latina spokesmodel. French Vogue featured a transgender model on its cover.
[Beyoncé loves his work. So does Melania. Meet the Gucci designer trying to bridge many divides.]
There are more models of color on major runways. A range of designers have included plus-size models and older women in shows and advertising. A more diverse group of designers, including four black men, make up the 10 finalists vying for the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund award. Women are also well-represented.

"I think fashion is becoming more democratized," says Henderson - for consumers as well as those hoping to build a career in the industry.

As fashion designers unveil their spring 2018 collections over the next few weeks, it will be an opportunity to see whether fashion's forward trajectory continues or stalls. "There's a consensus about having an inclusive runway," says Bart. "I'm hopeful at this stage."

Bart has been working in fashion for 30 years, and the first model he represented, back in 1986, was a young black woman who was part Russian. When a jewelry company was looking to hire someone "tall, pretty and effervescent," Bart suggested her. The company hemmed and hawed and "finally said, 'We're not looking for black people.' I dropped the phone." He ultimately got her the job after traveling to personally show them her portfolio.

After Hardison's 2007 town hall, Bart considered his place in the fashion business. As the head of one of the industry's larger agencies, with a roster including Smalls, Kate Moss and a host of celebrities, he decided to help lead the way.

"I think the industry got lazy," Bart says. "We've got to start telling [clients] what they need. When people say no, we have to tell them why they're wrong."

That's why he decided not to simply target Graham for the plus-size market, but for womenswear in general. On the company's website, she and fellow plus-size models Candice Huffine and Marquita Pring are not segregated in a separate category or called "plus-size." They are simply models. Graham has appeared on the cover of American Vogue and in runway shows alongside whippet-thin models. She has her own line of lingerie.

What the fashion industry does is important to the broader culture, Bart says, recalling actress Lupita Nyong'o's heartfelt speech about finding validation of her own dark-skinned beauty in the images of Sudanese-born model Alek Wek, whom IMG signed some 20 years ago.

"It's okay if people are resistant," he says. "They will change if you stay the course."
[James Scully's radical idea for the fashion industry: Treat models like human beings]
The website the Fashion Spot, which tracks diversity on the runway, has tallied about 30 percent nonwhite models in recent seasons. There are models in hijabs, models with vitiligo, models with physical disabilities. The question is no longer who isn't represented but how to make that inclusiveness feel organic rather than self-consciously trendy.

The need to change is not simply moral, Bart says, but also financially smart. "The Internet changed everything. Anyone can pull up anything online. If you want that consumer, you need to reflect who they are." If consumers don't like what they see, they are likely to make their displeasure heard.

The Vogue website has become a more diverse, global experience than the print magazine, speaking to "more people and different people," says Sally Singer, creative digital director. It even reads as if it is written by a variety of voices that share a common interest, rather than the single, dominant voice of print.

"I don't think it's a conscious decision," says Chioma Nnadi, the website's fashion news director. "Our staff is just very diverse and very young."

Vogue's digital natives roam freely and report on everything from the baati, a classic Somali cotton dress favored by hijab-wearing model Halima Aden to the personal aesthetics of people who identify as "they." While Vogue might have written about these subjects in the past, Singer says, it's doubtful that those stories would have found a readership within those communities. "Now, they're sharing it on Facebook."
[Chelsea Manning doesn't look glamorous in Vogue. And that's great.]
The Internet is also broadening the ranks of designers. Ten years ago, Henderson founded Harlem's Fashion Row, a production company aimed at supporting multicultural designers who were absent from the top fashion weeks, the store racks at influential retail outlets and the pages of mainstream glossies.

Back then, "I could barely count three designers of color. . . making a mark and getting the attention of the fashion industry," Henderson says. Today, she can rattle off nearly a dozen. Social media and e-commerce have lowered the barriers to success, making it easier for designers to connect directly with customers.

Designers can market themselves around the globe with a single website and an Instagram account. If an accepting audience isn't in New York or Los Angeles, perhaps there's one in Indianapolis or Tupelo, Singapore or Qatar.

One of the Harlem's Fashion Row designers, for example, found his fan base in Japan. Reuben Reuel's Demestik collection, worn by Ava DuVernay as well as Beyoncé, sells on Etsy.com. It's not Bergdorf Goodman, but it gets the job done.

"For designers 10 years ago, it was just all about the art. They didn't want to hear anything business-wise," Henderson says. "I was different, too. Something in the economy woke us up."

A recession will do that.

As the spring 2018 shows begin, the conversation about diversity has expanded to include the role of immigrants in the industry and the rights of women. Diversity is not just about the imperative of an inclusive runway. It is also about identity: both personal and national.

"Ten years ago people never wanted you to refer to them as a 'black designer.' Just call me a 'designer'! Now, with Black Lives Matter, with the political climate, people are proud to be a black designer. They're proud to say it to people in the fashion industry," Henderson says. "I even have more stylists who say they have clients who [specifically] want to wear a black designer."

Diversity is political. It's a form of protest.

When Vogue posted a story in March about women in East LA, it happened to coincide with a conversation about a rise in ICE raids under the Trump administration. It was the fashion site's most-shared story - in the middle of Paris Fashion Week.

"I thought we had lots of momentum after the civil rights movement and then we have Nazis go marching through Charlottesville," Bart says. "This is going to be our resistance: Showing the totality of humanity."

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Perspective | Fashion is finally figuring out diversity - in ways that actually matter

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The fashion industry has become more diverse, more inclusive. More open. It is less them-vs.-you. It is us. Yes, fashion still has its flaws. Designers often still have tunnel vision. The industry still makes head-smacking gaffes. There are far too many cases of profound insensitivity and cavalier cultural appropriation.

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The Change is Occurring but there is Room for More Improvement

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The Change is Occurring but there is Room for More Improvement

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In this article, the author states how beauty standards are changing, and how a more realistic version of women's bodies are preferred. More women are wanting to see women like them with bodies like theirs being depicted in the publications they chose to read. This is signifying a change in societies expectations (Spector, 2017).

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In 1990, I was just a little kid, but my ideas of physical beauty were already beginning to take shape. I knew my mother, an Hispanic woman who then was about 40, was the most beautiful woman alive; my father, a short 50-year-old Jewish guy, was the most handsome man. But they were stark exceptions; I mainly idealized younger, blonde and perky-nosed celebrities like Michelle Pfeiffer, who graced the cover People magazine's "50 Most Beautiful People In The World" issue that year.

Twenty-seven years later, People's curious tradition of ranking celebrity beauty continues, but as new research from JAMA Dermatology shows, the mag's criteria for its annual feature appears to have changed over time. 2017's edition of "The World's Most Beautiful" is an improvement on 1990's issue in that it is more diverse, allotting more coverage to people of color and to folks over 35 years old.

Here's a comparative breakdown:

In 1990, the percentage of white people featured: 76 percent. In 2017, this number was at 60 percent.

In 1990, people between the ages of 45 and 54 represented four percent of the list; in 2017, this age group accounted for 19.3 percent.

In 1990, 88 percent the skin tones featured were predominantly of the lightest shades, falling between type I and type II on the Fitzpatrick scale (a numerological system doctors use to determine how susceptible skin is to UV rays; type 1 is the fairest and most likely to burn); types IV through VI (moderate brown to darkest brown) accounted for a wimpy 12 percent. In 2017, these darker shades made up 29.6 percent.

The differences between 1990 and today were not ones that the paper's co-author, Dr. Neelam Vashi, MD, assistant professor of dermatology at Boston University School of Medicine was anticipating. In fact, when she and her team embarked on the research, they were working with the hypothesis that beauty standards had not much changed.

"I thought it would be static - that diversity and aging would not be embraced much more now than then," says Vashi. "Perhaps because I run a cosmetic center, I just thought that things would have been relatively the same."

Vashi added that her team elected People magazine to run their hypothesis because of its mass appeal.

"Reportedly People has the largest audience of any American magazine and its annual 'Most Beautiful' spread has been published for almost three decades," says Vashi." People did not return our request for comment.

One major reason we may be seeing more nonwhite or "other" races (the study's word, not ours) on People's lists is because of the "exposure effect," Dr. Frank Niles, a social scientist, explains.

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"The exposure effect is a basic psychological idea: The more we are exposed to something, the more attracted to it we may become," says Dr. Niles. "As a society, we have become more aware of the need and the value of diversity, and I think it is safe to say there are more people of color in positions of cultural visibility across a wider range of platforms."

To be clear, it's not like people of color (POC) haven't been here and beautiful for the past bajillion years; it's that only recently is Hollywood recognizing POC in a significant way, and transmitting that recognition to the public. In 1990, American women with brown skin such as my mother (still a loyal People subscriber!) had very little representation. And I can see now how that must not have been easy for her. I remember when I was a teenager, she'd study my hands, marvel at my fair skin and tell me I looked like Winona Ryder.

Gabriela Garcia, an editor with ModernBrownGirl.com, poignantly recalls the feeling of looking nothing like the celebrities she grew up idolizing in the '90s.

"When I was a teenager, Jennifer Aniston, Gwyneth Paltrow and Carolyn Bessette Kennedy were the women I emulated," said Garcia, now 39-years-old. "They were tall, lithe and had long flowing hair. I looked nothing like them. I was short, brown and hairy, with an overabundance of curves."

Garcia points to Jennifer Lopez as a notable catalyst (Lopez, by the way, was named People Magazine's 'most beautiful woman' in 2011).

"The rise of Jennifer Lopez was really important for young Latinas in the U.S," says Garcia. "For the first time, a brown girl with curves was popular and mainstream. She didn't shy away from her Latina-ness. I think she paved the way for other types of beauty. It wasn't until the media started to show women of different colors, sizes, and cultures that I began to realize that I was beautiful. And as silly as it sounds, women like J-Lo and Kim Kardashian have really helped promote body confidence for women who are not tall, blonde, and white."

If we're to look at People's "Most Beautiful" lists as a mirror of what the mainstream media accepts and promotes as beautiful, then it's clear we've made some progress. But as Dr. Catherine Kerrison, a professor of history, and of gender and women's studies at Villanova University notes, "This isn't cause for celebration." Why not? Well, let's have a look at those numbers again.

In 2017, People magazine featured 135 people in its "most beautiful" issue. That's 85 more than were included in 1990. That alone signifies that this is in part a numbers game. In other words, of course more types of people are included, there's more than double the amount of people being shown. But that's not what really concerns Dr. Kerrison. She's thinking about this number right here: In 1990, men made up nearly half (48 percent) of People's list; in 2017 they made up 11.9 percent. So, out of 135 people, only 16 were dudes.

This is concerning because it suggests that women, no matter how talented, successful, influential, powerful, and so on, it's her beauty that stands out.

"There are clearly many more women operating in visible and awesome ways in public life today than there were 30 years ago," says Kerrison. "Yet in spite of women's advances, beauty is being constituted primarily as female. As any woman in the public eye knows, it's crucial to her acceptance, her success that she present herself in ways that are acceptable to this standard. I can't say I am surprised, but the bottom line is: Women will be evaluated by standards of beauty and though those standards are expanding they are still critical to our success."

Arguably, the message being sent is that yes, ladies, there are more ways to be beautiful, but you've still got be beautiful.

Dr. Anna Yusim, a psychiatrist and the author of "Fulfilled: How the Science of Spirituality Can Help You Live a Happier, More Meaningful Life", points out that one reason women could be highlighted more than men is because the word "beautiful" has an effeminate association, whereas men typically lean toward the word "handsome." But, still glorifying the success of women by emphasizing their appearance only adds to the insane pressures women may be feeling, notes Yusim.

And so, it's important to remember that these constructs of beauty, whether you meet them or not, whether you even care about them or not: they aren't set in stone. Conventions of beauty change, just look at old Renaissance paintings that depict generous bellies and undulating curves as the quintessence of elegance.

What's more, with the advent of social media, we are able to set our own bars, start our own trends and flaunt our own ideas of and experiments in beauty. And even if today we are enthralled by caterpillar-thick brows and middle-parted hairdos, we tend not to forget where beauty really lies: on the inside. It's corny, but it's true, and that beauty doesn't come and go, it grows.

Want more tips like these? NBC News BETTER is obsessed with finding easier, healthier and smarter ways to live. Sign up for our newsletter and follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

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Who we consider beautiful are older and more diverse than 1990, study says

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In 1990, I was just a little kid, but my ideas of physical beauty were already beginning to take shape. I knew my mother, an Hispanic woman who then was about 40, was the most beautiful woman alive; my father, a short 50-year-old Jewish guy, was the most handsome man.

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An image of an Aerie Real Campaign. I believe this to be one of the biggest movements for women of our decade. Finally a brand the recognizes women of all shapes and colours. People are able to relate to it, and right now there is no better selling point. Stores like Victoria's Secret are sticking to what they are good at and are continuing to produce and advertise products to women with extremely thin bodies, businesses like this are suffering because they aren't keeping up with the times. Where as companies like Aerie recognize that women come in all shapes and sizes and this is helping them to grow their businesses (Vanderzwart, 2018).

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In this video passerby's were asked what society's definition of beauty was in a single world. The results: Skinny, thin, white, tanned, elegant, physic, hour-glass figured. In the video, Kainyn, the interviewer, considers the mental and physical costs of trying to attain society's definition of beauty and discusses with professionals about it. This relates to my topic because it really confirms what society's constructs for beauty standards are and society isn't oblivious to it (Kainyndachelle, 2016).

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A Visual Representation of Beauty Standards on Women Around the World

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A Visual Representation of Beauty Standards on Women Around the World

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This video was made to show different beauty standards around the world. A women sent an untouched photo of her self to experts in photo enhancement and asked them to make her beautiful, from 22 different parts of the world comes the startling result. The results were intriguing. This is relatable to the changes of beauty standards to get a clear idea of today's beauty standards (As/Is, 2014)

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This is my reflection for the final term project.

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A Raw and Emotional Short Documentary on Beauty Standards Today

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A Raw and Emotional Short Documentary on Beauty Standards Today

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Young adults were asked to give their personal definition of beauty, they identified that when using google images to look up 'beautiful women' theinternet's idea of beauty most images were of Caucasians. People of colour identified that when Caucasians wore styles traditionally worn by people of colour, Caucasians were still regarded as beautiful where as people of colour were regarded as being "dirt or not cute". Each person was asked if they felt beautiful most reported they did not feel beauty themselves and reflected that they wished society focused more on inner beauty than what was occurring out the exterior of their bodies (Arts, 2017).

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Beauty | Documentary on Societal Beauty Standards