Obviously the image of the “ideal woman” changes from country to country, but we’ve never realized just how much.
The project “Perceptions of Perfection” was created by the online UK pharmacy Superdrug Online Doctors. This company hired designers from around the world, gave them all an image of the same woman and asked them to photoshop her to reflect their respective country’s beauty standard.
“Widely held perceptions of beauty and perfection can have a deep and lasting cultural impact on both women and men,” the press release states. “The goal of this project is to better understand potentially unrealistic standards of beauty and to see how such pressures vary around the world.”
The results are pretty shocking – -the ideal body for some countries are very similar while other countries have huge differences. Here was the original image that each designer was asked to edit.
Some countries’ edits were barely unrecognizable while others entirely altered the woman’s figure. China and Italy photoshopped the woman to be dramatically thin while countries like Venezuela and Columbia edited her to be have a thin waste but curvy hips and a bigger chest.
Nothing was off limits. Her facial features, skin tone, bra, underwear, waist, legs, arms and even her hair were edited to that country’s version of perfection! After studying the results and doing some estimates, Superdrug found that China had the lightest ideal weight at 102 pounds and Spain had the heaviest at 153. That’s a majorly drastic difference!
14 out of 18 of these designers were women while four were men. It’s important to note, however , that the male designers were required to get female feedback before submitting their designs. This was done to see what women believed their country found attractive and to reveal which pressures of beauty they face.
