Beauty

Alex Keith has concerns that many start-up and boutique beauty brands don’t.

Anastasia Garcia creates images featuring women across the spectrum of shapes, sizes, races, ages and abilities. Her work has been featured for brands including Chromat, Amazon and Lane Bryant and in the documentary “Straight/Curve” about the body image crisis in fashion. When she thinks What the Future, she asks, “What if we eliminated beauty standards?”

Ipsos conducted a survey for RiverMend Health that shows that many of us are not. When asked about situations in which we feel “dissatisfied” with our bodies, only one in five reports always feeling satisfied. In contrast, nearly twice as many people —and more than twice as many women— report feeling dissatisfied when they look in the mirror.

Beauty routines develop over time. Women experiment with new skin care and makeup products that meet their needs, but in order for a product to be used regularly, it must also fit with morning and evening beauty routines.

So beauty for beauty’s sake is a thing in nature, yet science also tells us that there are certain biologically-driven standards. Facial symmetry, for example, is something humans are wired to find attractive. And so, in an Ipsos Global Advisor poll, we see remarkable consistency in physical definitions of beauty across nations and cultures.