IF THE BEAUTY STANDARD WAS REVERSED

hey everybody it's lavender toown and I'm not going to lie half this video was inspired by this picture of Jacob ol Lordi and Rachel zegler they look like the far ends of a Pokémon evolution beauty standards for men and women are always changing and every culture has differences as well for example for the wab people in Chad men wear flashier and more colorful Cosmetics than the girls and women and the beauty standards between men and women in Korea share many qualities with both men and women being rewarded for smooth Flawless skin and T slender physiques but I've noticed that in the US lately the beauty standard between men and women has become super extreme and polarized with the it girls being tiny with dainty youthful faces and smooth skin whereas for guys Ultra tall and buff actors and influencers with insanely chisled faces are rising to the top since the list of desirable features have become so desperate between the two I thought it would be fun to try and design two characters featuring the opposite Beauty ideals from popular culture okay so I collected up some of the basic uh guy ideals that's guy ideals and girl expectations which is girl expectations here are some of the main things I'm going to be focusing on tall obviously Broad shouldered and muscled and cragged now this I'm kind of talking about like how in a men's magazine you see the guys like they've actually like upped the contrast and make them look like as like I don't even know how to you see the divots and stuff in their muscles and their face um the jaw big and sharp thing this has become really huge like the trend of like guys mewing and stuff to try to get their jaw more defined and have that like you know handsome Squidward kind of face a straight nose this is less of a common thing for people to talk about but I have definitely noticed that in general like having a straighter nose on guys seems to be more desirable or like more common um with celebrities and stuff positive Canal tilt this is some like weird I think this comes from like weird incel communities anyway it just means that the eyes are going like up at the at the ends it's kind of like a cat eye for girls um this I just mentioned cuz it was weird and I'm going to try to incorporate on our girl character and then the last one that I thought of was like big hands um I notice a lot of like the romance novel girls um they are very interested in this and like I feel like this has become a big like ideal thing for for for men in our culture all right so now it's time to draw our most handsome girl possible I'm going to try and include as many of the traits that I have listed uh as well as talking about some other things as they come up that I noticed showing up over and over in um images of like guy celebrities guy models that kind of thing um now when I was drawing her I was trying to think a lot about what I've been seeing also on social media I feel like this is one of the first times in a while where even like teen boys are feeling a lot of the social pressure that historically teen girls are more familiar with um particularly this idea of like breaking down your appearance into pieces like your jawline your height uh your musculature these are things that I feel like it didn't used to be as much of a thing like in the early 2000s and the '90s a guy was just like good-look or not um and now I feel like maybe because of filters social media who knows um it's kind of Fallen also on guys to be like this hypercritical sort of like looking at all the pieces of yourself um divorce from your total body but like you're you're just thinking about every little fraction of your appearance and trying to optimize it which I think is interesting I don't necessarily think it's uh a good thing cuz I I don't feel like the the path towards equality is making everyone suffer equally um but it is interesting and something to note uh so one of the things I definitely wanted to feature was the jawline there's so much content online about like meu and trying to make your jaw really sharp and make your face very like ideal structure um so that's something I wanted to uh apply onto her face and I immediately noticed it made her look more like a male character right away this is such a like gendered um Beauty uh feature uh to men specifically um I also made sure she was taking up space uh there is a huge difference I noticed not just in you know the types of bodies that we uh promote when it comes to male celebrities versus female cele but also how we pose them and um one of the things I really noticed when I was looking at pictures of male models and male celebrities is that they have a much more open posture um their shoulders are more likely to be squared at the camera whereas with female celebrities I kept seeing these pictures where they've turned their shoulders and they're like they turn their face and their shoulders in line with each other so that their body is looking smaller and Slimmer um and just taking up a smaller amount of the visual space in the photo this is such an interesting exercise as a character designer and an artist because it's hard for you to even really think in a conscious way about all the biases you have when you're developing a male character versus a female character until you intentionally try and detangle them like I'm doing here um I would just never draw a girl with these kind of facial features if I wasn't really consciously doing it I have a lot of like defaults that I just automatically start drawing in um and I think it's probably really healthy and good to do this every once in a while just so that you're aware of what your impulses are um and where those are coming from if that's genuinely part of your art practice or if this is something that you're just repeating because you've seen it so many times um for girl spectations uh tiny and skinny waist these are two different things um like overall tininess like being small um I think we've had a lot of different eras where girls being tall has also been good um like the supermodel era in the 9s but I feel like right now we're in this thing where like height differences are considered really cute so the girls always expected to be just like super super small and I've definitely noticed with the rise of like uh JGA and like other actresses who are just like really tiny um I'm seeing more of that um smooth and poreless skin this has been pretty consistent like you see a lot of like Photoshop mess ups where like they're literally like going Jeff the Killer mode on um the actresses or models faces where like all that's left is like nostrils and eyes juicy lips this has definitely been a thing ever since like uh you know the lip kit it's it's become a part of our our cultural standard for quite a while now and I don't see it going away um small upturn nose again this has been pretty consistent if you look at even actresses from like the 80s and '90s this is stuck around and I don't think it's going anywhere um big eyes same here uh no body hair um this has been pretty consistent and it's it's pretty strict I feel like people are talking about like waxing and shaving more and more parts of their body um so that's definitely something to think about and then form fitting clothes this is more something that I don't feel like people talk about but I think it actually goes along with like this and the whole idea of not taking up too much space so you're trying to make sure that your clothes also aren't like bulking you out at all all right now it's time to draw our ultimate pretty boy and design him uh we're going to start with him in this pose that I talked about earlier uh with the shoulder up kind of coily looking over the shoulder and turning the body away to the side of the camera this is a pose that you never see a male actor or celebrity doing without it being like a joke so this is a really good start I feel like to the challenge um he's going to have obviously no arm hair or anything like that um and in general I'm just trying to keep his facial features looking more in line with the uh feminine ideal that we see in celebrities and it girls of today uh so he is going to have the small upturn nose the more like heart-shaped face with the softer jaw um and bigger eyes with Fuller lips um now again like I kind of experienced when I was drawing our handsome girl it's amazing how just applying some of these facial features immediately starts to read more as a girl character especially in a more exaggerated cartoony style um these things are just they're so uh frequently tied to the character's gender when it comes to um cartoon depictions and everything it's like they're totally intertwined culturally I feel like so uh of course he's not going to have any like of the cragginess that I apply to the girl character on her face obviously all of that gets reduced anyway with a cartoon art style but you can definitely show it with a few carefully placed lines um and I'm not going to place any of those on his face so no wrinkles of any kind and no sort of depiction of the cheekbones or anything like that we're going for super smooth and Youthful looking and that was the thing that I definitely started to notice I was like this character the the boy character with like girl social expectations applied looks so young like so much younger like a like a you know like an adolescent um um rather than like a a teen or an adult um which I think is really interesting because like I've definitely heard that um you know our our beauty standards for women is getting more and more obsessed with youth um but it becomes really clear when you're applying it to a male character because it starts to look more weird um because it's not something we're used to so yeah definitely he looks really really sweet very cute and dainty um and those are just not things I think that we usually associate with our male characters so uh here I am kind of like shrinking him down um they're I just tried to make their heads the same size and man the the overall size of them actually almost perfectly matches the height and uh Mass difference between Jacob a lordy and Lucy Gray beard uh which I think is a nice detail I didn't even necessarily plan that um that's just kind of how it turned out um now I'm going to draw them together as if they are in a Riverdale uh high school together I.E they are adults um but in a corny High School setting uh so he's going to be a cheerleader for our uh female uh football player I just thought this would be a fun way to sort of show their like Dynamic towards each other and like the different ways that we sort of slot different characters based on their gender into certain roles originally I was planning on having the illustration of them together at the end of the video be more of like a romantic one where she's like sort of aggressively pursuing him him um but I ended up not even wanting to do it because I thought it would look so creepy because she looks so much older than him and I think that that's kind of interesting it really made me think the thing I really hope that everyone takes away from this video other than that artist should try this and it's kind of fun going against the standard default when it comes to designing your characters is also just to keep in mind that like anytime you're feeling bad for not being handsome or beautiful enough like that it's kind of based on this constantly shifting list of prerequisites that are entirely made up um you know like the beauty standard it literally changes based on location and time all the time uh so it's really important not to put too much stock in uh being the ideal at the time cuz even if you are for a moment it will change again um so it's really important to find your like respect for yourself in other places because otherwise you're just going to be sad and chasing it all of your life and you really don't want to be doing that oh I should mention I tried to use some reference for the muscles on our female character from pictures of lean be Patty on Instagram thank you to her for for that um finding pictures of really muscular girls who aren't like totally like you know tanned oiled up bodybuilders is kind of tricky sometimes so I was appreciative to that in general I just really really like how these turn characters turned out like I think my girl character in particular I think she looks really neat um I kind of want to like redesign her tattoos and give her like a sleeve or something I have a couple little like adjustments and changes I'd like to make on her for my male character I'm like less satisfied with it for whatever reason I definitely want to make a few changes on him as well and just try to make him look a little more interesting I think because I've seen this character type in anime more he feels less intriguing to me and um I definitely feel like I could push it farther and get to a more interesting result but all that being said I really hope you guys enjoyed the video let me know if you have any ideas for videos in the future and I'll see you guys in the next one huge thank you to my wonderful patrons including twink on a SN raccoon Jam the Aiden verse Scott Wilson greius oia lyy Savior Brandon Stark CB Cosby F Luciana ji Liv live salty Jack Rabbit Ravens Crow zelot tle music jabber daber Doo cadarius deadly nightshade art astral fox art the expressive Poker Face suaki cutie pie ice cream pal JJ Jade and of course blah blah blah blah

Channel: LavenderTowne

Views: 319,352

Keywords: art, lavender, towne, lavendertowne, digital, photoshop, cartoon, redraw, redesign, beauty standard

Id: SjdQYA1WLxI

Length: 13min 45sec (825 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 11 2024