Have you ever wondered that in your own country
you might be considered a bit of an ugly duckling, but get on a plane for a few hours and you
can arrive at a new destination a veritable Adonis or Aphrodite? That might be a stretch of the imagination,
but indeed ideas of beauty have changed somewhat throughout the centuries and are not always
compatible from country to country. For years science has struggled with the idea
of universal beauty, and while features that signify health and vitality seem to always
be popular, the ideal body and face does indeed change all over the world. Let’s start with skin, and the tone of our
skin. Many of you might not know that while in some
countries people would literally almost die to have a tan on their skin, in other places
right now girls and boys, men and women, are going to extremes to whiten their skin. This is big in many parts of Asia, some parts
of Africa and the Middle East. Visit some countries and you will see people
wearing gloves and face masks in the boiling son, all because they don’t want our wonderful
power-provider in the sky to darken the hue of their skin. Let us again stress, in some countries this
is the norm, not some kind of unusual affliction. And we are talking about whitening everything,
from the face, to the armpits, to the nipples, to the bottom, as well as male and female
genitals. What!? We hear you exclaim, why would those crazy
folks want to bleach their nether regions, never mind their beautiful brown face. We’re afraid that it’s a very long story,
but you should take note that bleaching the face white was very common among European
nobility, including Kings and Queens of England. During the 16th, 17th, 18th centuries people
would go to extremes to lighten their skin, sometimes using arsenic and other chemicals
that could damage the skin or even kill someone. Yep, people might die to be beautiful, and
even today there are thousands of cases of people being injured using dubious whitening
creams. But why? As one expert tells us about the idea of European
beauty in the past, “The ideology of white supremacy that European colonists brought
included the association of blackness with primitiveness, lack of civilization, unrestrained
sexuality, pollution, and dirt.” People who worked the fields didn’t usually
have such pallor, they were under the sun all day. It was a class thing for the most part, and
being white was correlated with being a higher class of citizen. In some part of the world today, being white
means you are not working in the fields, selling snacks in the street, riding motorcycle taxis,
but you are somehow above, maybe having the cash to stay at home or are earning big money
working in an office. Even now, though often unspoken, people in
some parts of the world relate dark skin to peasantry. We should add that people, companies, don’t
outright say that, but whitening product commercials have been heavily criticized for implying
that. Some westerners scoff at this, laughing at
whitening armpit cream sold in 7-Eleven, and then they find a beautiful tropical beach
and stay under the sun all day getting a terrible sunburn and improving their chances of future
skin cancer. Back home they might sit under sunbeds, just
so they don’t look like one of the folks that never gets to travel to wonderful beaches
in Asia and the Caribbean. Yep, they are also manipulated and under the
spell of traditional ideas of beauty and the underscoring of class snobbery. The tan, say some experts, began to become
more popular in western nations when international travel became more accessible. I have money, I will travel, come back, and
you know I’ve been somewhere you can’t afford. Also, when Europe became less agrarian and
more industrial, it was the working class people working in factories all day not getting
any sun on their skin. The pale people then became the peasants,
not the tanned people. That’s part of it, anyway. So, to all you milk-pale people in the UK,
get yourself over to China where your pallor is a la mode. Actually the UK, where the white skin craze
was kinda kicked off by Queen Elizabeth I and where the sun shines at about the same
rate as the Earth quakes, is said to be the Fake Tan capital of the world. And you bronze beauties, just know people
are willing to risk terminal illness to have your skin. Yep, we are all beautiful in some ways. Ok, enough of skin. What about size? Do you remember when supermodels began to
get so thin it became a matter of public awareness? When did Sandro Botticelli’s shapely Venus
become too overweight? Since when did the grisly, tough guy stop
being attractive and man-bunned guys started starving themselves for the perfect 26-inch
waist? Skinny has taken over? Or has it? This one is difficult to explain, but as the
BBC reported in some countries the thin, very feminine man is very attractive. To many westerners those male Korean pop models
that makes the girls go crazy might just look like…er…girls. Femininity in a man can be attractive in many
parts of Asia, so don’t worry guys if you lack that tough look. The BBC has called this “soft masculinity”
and in countries such as China, Japan, South Korea and Thailand these rather feminine-looking
men are very attractive. Just check out the celeb magazines. But we are told even in western nations such
pretty boys are now the popular choice over the rough-looking guys of the 80s and 90s. The Telegraph writes, “Millennial men have
gone soft.” Meanwhile, being very masculine has become
intertwined with toxicity. Studies do show though, at least some studies,
that western men are indeed becoming more feminine. After all, they look after the kids more,
cook more, fix the car less, hunt less, fight less. But get this, you guys with thick jaws and
strong gnarly hands, recent studies suggest that women in poorer countries prefer you. A University of Aberdeen study told us this
was because women perceive them as having better genetic health, and that’s important
when life is tough. So, you large-fisted, fishing-loving, car-fixing,
hot-headed, iron-pumping, men of steel, head over to a developing nation where the women
think they need you. Your time is wasted waiting in Starbucks for
a damsel in distress. Perhaps when life is easier, men just lose
their grizzly look and sign-up for the man-bun. The jury is still out and we don’t want
to generalize too much. We can say that overt masculinity has perhaps
become less of an attractive thing, but it seems not everywhere. As for fatness, we are told there are still
a few countries in the world where a chunky lady is preferred from a woman with an hour-glass
figure or that has a waist she has designed through years of strict dieting and exercise. Well-rounded women are said by some sources
to be preferred in places such as Samoa and Jamaica and Kuwait, while fatness was attractive
in many more places not that long ago because it was related to prosperity. The New York Times writes that plumpness has
seen a rise and fall in India over the recent decades, and while an obese woman in the past
might have been preferred, now the newspaper says it’s more likely to be correlated with
being slovenly. The BBC tells us that places where malnourishment
is widespread, there might be people believing big is beautiful. We might also look at the USA, where having
a big booty isn’t a bad thing. The Kardashian backside is certainly not attractive
everywhere, while some people in America today still prefer bigger lips and oversized, augmented
mammilla. According to some sources, that used adult
video site data in their research, it seems the USA likes big chested women and large
behinds, while those bouncy booties for some reason are a lot more popular in countries
in the southern hemisphere besides Australasia and parts of South Asia. Let’s now look at the ears, nose, mouth
and eyes. It’s hard to find a place where there is
a standard of ear beauty. You can check out forums where worried people
ask about their ears, and it seems to be generally acceptable that big or small isn’t so bad,
but some people don’t like their ears if they stick out too much. On the whole, though, people pay much less
attention to ears than they do to the eyes, nose and mouth. In the West it’s written that for a long
time a smaller nose has been more attractive than a big honker. Psychology Today tells us that the less prominent
your nose is in the West, the better. Your nose needs to be discreet, the article
said. That’s the reason why quite a few westerners
go in for a nose job, aka, Rhinoplasty. But did you know, no nose is too large in
some countries. You can find nations where people generally
have a snub nose, especially some Asian countries, and people spend more money than they can
afford on making their nose bigger – sometimes to the extent it’s really obvious it’s
been built-up. Thailand’s clinics are full to the brim
with people, mainly women, getting nose jobs. They might pay less and go to some roadside
clinic, and according to the BBC they might receive a botch job or may even die. All over Asia, extending that bridge is not
usual. CNN writes that it’s just another fad linked
to people trying to look more Caucasian. And then we come to eyes, and again many Asians
will have them “done”. That means making them bigger and making the
eyelids double over (blepharoplasty) more like Caucasian people. This gives an extra fold of skin. In the West a popular surgery is to remove
excess folds of skin, but that’s usually down to ageing. The eyes can also be made to look wider (epicanthoplasty),
common in Asia. In the West it seems people don’t go in
for making their eyes smaller, except for when they have a medical condition that makes
them bug-eyed. We might add that a fad picking up speed in
parts of Asia is making the face V-Shaped, which means shaving down a squarish jaw and
making it pointier at the chin. Asian female net idols, if you are inclined
to follow them, sometimes have oversized eyes, an aquiline nose and a chiseled chin. People sometimes don’t even mind if the
surgery looks obvious, because getting surgery means you have money and so are of a higher
status. Most agree, it’s to try and look more Caucasian. On that rationale, if you are Caucasian and
don’t feel beautiful maybe head to Asia, or parts of Asia. Over in the USA, Women’s Health magazine
reported in 2015 that some women were going to extraordinary lengths to make their lips
fuller – sometimes extremely full. One doctor in that article said, “Lip augmentation
is certainly not going away, but whether it's increasing varies from practice to practice.” He also said women going for huge lips, or
“fish-lips” was becoming less common. Then in 2017, reports told us lip reduction
was in vogue in the US, a trend that has been around in Asia for quite some time. It’s complicated, but some sources say some
Asian women want smaller mouths and thinner lips to look more Caucasian and some western
women want fuller lips to look more sensual. So, while some people are getting their proboscis
shrunk others are having permanent scaffold erected. Some of us die for a tan and some of us are
willing to bleach our private parts just for those occasions someone might stumble upon
them. Over there they prefer buxom, and over here
they prefer slim. Sometimes we want what we just don’t have,
and often unconsciously we are following modes of fashion related to status and class. But as we said at the start, at least we all
have a feature that is attractive somewhere. Of course we had to generalize a bit today,
and citizens of countries will have their own idea of beauty. But there is certainly some truth in what
we have said. What we’d like to know is how you feel about
this, and maybe tell us what your standards of beauty are. If you liked this video, I suggest watching
I slept for 3 hours for a week and this is what happened. Thanks for watching, and as always, don’t
forget to like, share and subscribe. See you next time.
I have thick eyebrows and unless I constantly trim them, I end up with a gnarly unibrow. I always figured that I would be Chad tier in Central Asia.
The U.S. State Department would like to dispel you of this notion.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-35937635