National Geographic Interactive - 02.2020

(Chris Devlin) #1

FEBRUARY (^) | FROM THE EDITOR
Who Gets to Judge
What’s Beautiful?
BY SUSAN GOLDBERG PHOTOGRAPH BY HANNAH REYES MORALES
WOMEN:
A CENTURY
OF CHANGE
multitude that many more girls might
appreciate—every color of skin and
shape of eyes, every texture of hair;
different noses, lips, and body types.
“We are moving toward a culture of
big-tent beauty. One in which every-
one is welcome,” Givhan writes. Of
course, that’s not yet fully the reality.
But as someone who’s the same age as
Barbie—we both entered the world in
1959—I marvel at the progress. We don’t
all have to be Peggy Lipton anymore.
Givhan says it best: “The new out-
look on beauty dares us to declare
someone we haven’t met beautiful.
It forces us to presume the best about
people. It asks us to connect with peo-
ple in a way that is almost childlike in
its openness and ease. Modern beauty
doesn’t ask us to come to the table
without judgment. It simply asks us
to come presuming that everyone in
attendance has a right to be there.”
Thank you for reading National
Geographic. j
WHEN I WAS YOUNG, what my friends
and I considered pretty was everything
I was not: Tall. Stick-straight blond
hair. Blue eyes. We wanted to look like
Peggy Lipton from the TV show The
Mod Squad. Or a 1960s Barbie, with her
yellow ponytail and absurdly unattain-
able figure. But every day, the mirror
provided a reflection of how I, and so
many others, failed to attain that ideal.
As writer Robin Givhan puts it in
“Redefining Beauty,” her story in
this issue, “For generations, beauty
required a slender build but with a gen-
erous bosom and a narrow waist. The
jawline was to be defined, the cheek-
bones high and sharp. The nose angu-
lar. The lips full but not distractingly
so. The eyes, ideally blue or green, large
and bright. Hair was to be long, thick,
and flowing—and preferably golden.
Symmetry was desired. Youthfulness,
that went without saying.”
When National Geographic decided
to spend 2020 examining the state
of the world’s women, we debated
whether to write about beauty. Would
that be shallow or playing into stereo-
types? In the end, we concluded our
coverage would be incomplete if we
didn’t address the outsize role that
beauty plays in women’s lives.
In every country and culture,
women are perceived and judged,
advantaged or disadvantaged, by their
appearance in ways that men are not.
Social media ratchets up the pressure,
with body shaming and Instagram-
filtered ideals. Let’s not even talk about
the ubiquity of cosmetic surgery.
Still, humanity’s standards of beauty
are expanding; for proof, see the some-
what creepy but highly illustrative
photo above. The homogeneous Barbie
of the baby boom is gone, replaced by a
A crowded headshot of
Barbies, at the toymaker’s
design center, shows how
the doll has been adapted to
be more diverse and inclusive.
“Every day we’re fed imagery
of beauty,” says Hannah Reyes
Morales, who photographed
this month’s story. But increas-
ingly, says Manila-based
Morales, global movements
“are seeking to reshape how
we define beauty.”

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