Modern Day Screen Beauties

Today, who do women have to aspire to as beauty icons? Whilst we still have the icons of old, we women require current idols to advise us on what is stylish, what hairstyles are fashionable and how to wear ourmake-up. I very strongly remember the influence that the Spice Girls had on me whenever I was hitting puberty, particularly the way they dressed and their makeup (it is a vast understatement to say that I was not fashion conscious as a young lady!)

However, our "style icons" of today are ridiculously influenced by the media. Most actresses go blonde at some point in their career as it's seen to be more attractive. We've all read the salacious magazine articles regarding the fluctuating weight of actresses and models and pop stars.

We hear of the "necessity" of airbrushing magazine covers and photoshoots - telling us subconsciously that these beauties are not attractive enough and could always look better. Which leads me neatly to the phenomenal rise in cosmetic surgery. It has become normalized, which I must be honest, horrifies me. Where does it end? Why must we change ourselves physically to such a dramatic extent? The women I listed earlier never had such dramatic surgeries. And we still regard them as beautiful regardless of this face.

Modern Beauty Conventions

One idle day, during a meeting of our Final Year English students, I was suddenly struck with the overwhelming majority of girls with long blonde hair (natural or otherwise - generally otherwise), that were all dressed in a similar vein (Jack Willis meets hobo, on whole) with glamorous make-up.

In the States, a tan is not hard to come by - which means starlets tend to have a healthy "glow" to their skin. Here in the UK, we're lucky to have sunlight long enough to buy t-shirt, nevermind get a tan. So girls apply a lot of fake tan to get that "healthy glow" (a move the goes tragically wrong a lot - but that is not for this hub!!) and it is seen as positively strange to not apply fake tan. It's become an expected beauty act to apply fake tan.

These are just a small portion of what appears to be expected of women today in order to be seen as attractive or beautiful.

It's Not All Bad Though!

Yes, not all women are being pressganged into these conventional ideas of beauty. There are some gorgeous female icons at the moment who are beautiful and curvyor beautiful and with dyed hair and tattoos or beautiful and slightly kooky/alternative.

Dita Von Teese is a gorgeous, curvy figure who screams back to old Hollywood glamour and the burlesque movement.

Christina Hendricks from AMC's "Mad Men" has a positively Monroe-esq figure and is being praised by a lot of magazines for not playing into the Hollywood diet fads.

Angelina Jolie is regularly on the "most gorgeous" women's lists but is covered in tattoos.

As long as we have these stunning women who return to the wide variety of silver-age beauty, I feel that society will be okay. Obviously a relaxing on the beauty standards by fashion publications would benefit the beauty ideals massively but I truly believe that society will eventually return to this recognition of beauty and the wide variety of examples that beauty comes in.