How to Decolonize Your Beauty Standards
Your body is not the problem! After a breakup, wanting to fix our bodies to look more appealing to others may feel like the ideal step to take.
The emotions are high. Your stress hormones are releasing. You’re probably wondering what you should have done differently.
With all these thoughts swarming your head, it can be a quick reaction to automatically go to coping mechanisms that seem like a quick fix. Maybe you think changing your hair color will be the new fix to get you back into the dating scene. Or, if you were to simply lose a few pounds and work on toning your body, maybe you’d become more attractive.
Here’s the problem with those thoughts. These coping mechanisms focus solely on outward appearance rather than the dealings of the heart.
The desire to fix your body may stem from outward pressure from the world around you. Thoughts about wanting to fix your body to get others’ attention or get back at your ex are often rooted in the media we consume.
Where did beauty standards come from?
Eurocentric beauty standards are standards that often disqualify modern women. They focus on bone-straight hair, blue eyes, and a thin waist. These standards often highlight one particular type of women, and don’t leave room for any body type that goes against this. For years, beauty standards have unconsciously been ingrained in our minds through the media, books, and other forms of entertainment. The farther you are from the standard, the less currency you have in the world.
It can be traced back to colonization, during the trans-atlantic slave trade. Enslavers would often determine a person’s “worthiness,” based on the color and physique of their body. Physical traits that differed from the usual standard would often be considered inferior, which to them, justified the harsh treatment of Black bodies.
Tracing back from then, beauty standards have impacted Black and Brown children and subsequently altered our view of ourselves as adults.
How can we decolonize our beauty standards?
If we want to become the healthier version of ourselves inwardly and outwardly, we must focus on creating our own beauty standards.
This means firstly acknowledging that your ideal body may not be one you actually desire, but instead, a body that feeds into Eurocentric ideas of beauty.
Coming to terms with this can put us on a path to healing our inner child and dismantling all of the negative things we have heard about our hips, butt and thighs since growing up.
Consider this: your body is worthy of love just the way it is, in whatever state it is in. There is nothing you need to do to it to be more worthy or desirable for love because love is something we all deserve.
For those needing support with eliminating negative beauty standards, my “Single, Empowered, and Free: Decolonize Your Singlehood Mindset & Redefine Your Future” seminar can help!
This 1-hour self-paced course will help you shift the focus from thoughts about everything you’re doing wrong in relationships to challenging the systems making you feel like you’ll never be enough.