As a woman, I spent most of my life hearing unsolicited comments about my looks. At some point, the comments started following a pattern: my skin was too pale, my butt too fat, my face too small (‘Never get bangs!’), my nose too big, my hair too flat, and so on. Most women and feminine-presenting people, but also many others, know how this goes: society—in the form of your mother, older relatives, even friends, and sometimes strangers—needs to pass judgement on your appearance, teach you everything that is wrong with it, and instruct you on how to fix it.
I learned to tune it out. I had to.
Things changed when I moved to Japan: the comments were new, different, and—probably due to a mix of cultural and language barriers (took me a few weeks to feel comfortable with the language, even after studying it for years)—even scarier than I remembered them being.
Everyday life wasn’t much easier: I couldn’t find my size (a European M) in most shops! My body was in a constant struggle against Japanese society. And I got told what I believed were the most offensive comments on a daily basis. Sometimes these were comments I had heard already, like the ones about my pale complexion, and sometimes new ones like ‘Your head is so small!’ I was been told this on enough occasions that I assumed it meant my brain, assumed I must have looked awfully stupid at first glance.
It took me a while to be able to talk with Japanese people about these endless, heavy-handed comments, a bit because of the language barriers and partially because of their reticence to open up to new people. Their answers, though, changed my outlook on not only my body in particular, but also on beauty standards in general.
I found out that the comments that in my head translated to my being “too pale,” actually meant something else. In the original Japanese, people simply said shiroi (白い、しろい), meaning “white,” and they meant exactly that: white. My ‘pale’ complexion was being complimented for months, and I had not realized. So were my small face and ‘tall’ nose, all comments I was taking in a negative way because of what I had been told growing up. I also learned that thin lips were considered beautiful, as was anybody who had the blue eyes-blonde hair combination. I had been called tall on several occasions, and assumed that people were making fun of me until I found that I really was considered tall, standing at 162 centimeters. And I was considered overweight (55 kilograms), yes, but a lot of women still envied my average (by European standards) chest and ‘fat’ butt. The contradictions were so abundant I needed a moment to process them.
When I did, I loved my conclusion: beauty standards are completely made up. Of course, we all know that up to a point. The ideal figure of today is different from the one of fifty years ago, and both are different from the one of a hundred years ago, and so on. But the idea that these standards might change so radically because of where one is born, because of the culture one grows up in, is absolutely dazzling. The traits that make me ‘ugly’ in Italy are the same traits that make me beautiful in Japan, and vice-versa.
No Japanese woman will ever look as white as she wishes to. No Italian woman will ever have the thin Japanese frame she yearns for. Isn’t that humanity? Aren’t we all supposed to be as different and beautiful and ugly as we are?
‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder’ takes on a whole different meaning when we realize that all our perceptions are indeed different, and these opinions aren’t innate; it depends on what we’ve been taught to think over years and years of indoctrination. Beauty standards are dogmas written in no book, with no formula to support them. We’re choosing to trust them because we’ve been conditioned to do so, and breaking such walls is challenging. But the world is so much prettier once we jump over them—and so are we, if we want to believe so.