The Fight Against TikTok’s Repackaged Beauty Standards

Trigger warning: eating disorders

Female beauty standards are not anything new. You must have shaved legs (but no strawberry legs, please), have a porcelain-smooth face and stay thin and toned. Women are forced to either look like dolls or supermodels, and there is no in-between. Many women have faced or overcome these insecurities, but due to the new age of social media, there are more anxieties to add to this grocery list:

Cortisol face. Facial harmony. Buccal fat removal. A double lip line. Whatever else TikTok is telling you to get plastic surgery for. 

It is all too much and too overwhelming. Unfortunately, every generation is succumbing to this, with women gracefully in their 40s who say they must slim their faces, or millennials craving a curvy body. 

With every trend and side of the Internet, there are new ways people are developing and enforcing these standards. On TikTok, there are mounds of hyper-individualistic styles (usually ending in the -core or -girl prefixes), from the famous cottagecore, characterized by pastoral fashion and rural European living, to tomato girl, which is famous for its romantic summery and Mediterranean aesthetic. However, they seldom cater to plus-sized women. The pictures used in inspiration videos are usually thin women, like Hailey Bieber being reigned as the ‘clean girl’ queen. If there are aesthetics with plus-sized women in mind, it is a plus-sized woman either forming a new style or producing content to make the style more accessible. 

There are also many spaces for women to promote eating disorders. In the 2000s and 2010s, Tumblr was the hub for pro-ana (pro-anorexia, which encourages anorexia and other disorders) content. It has now been translated to TikTok but was rebranded as “wellness” or “healthy eating.” Some women say they eat around 1,350 calories daily while women need about 1,600 to 2,400 calories. There is another phenomenon of creators making “What I Eat in a Day” videos where they initially body check. Body checking refers to showing or giving information about one’s body to gain feedback about their size. In “What I Eat in a Day” TikToks, women may lift their clothes to reveal their stomachs or examine themselves in a full-body shot. 

There is a resurgence of fatphobic humor as well. The term “big back,” originally a quip towards gluttony, is not a new joke. TikTok has evolved to make fun of plus-sized people’s broader backs and shames others for simply eating. 2023’s Girl Dinner trend is the antithesis, where women were eating fun, lazy snack platters rather than making a full meal. Then, pro-ana TikTokers mutated it by saying a handful of nuts and water were enough to nourish them. The Internet is toeing a fine line with these food- and eating-related jokes. It may start light and even positive, but some digital subculture finds a way to popularize a negative version and make us insecure. 

This is not how we end body negativity nor how we start to embrace our bodies. These videos have the implicit argument that one must be incredibly skinny to be healthy, or women can only be beautiful if they have a low-calorie diet and look airbrushed. That is why we have filters that slim your face, give you big eyes and make your face acne-free. It is why people use the liquify tool in Photoshop to make their waists smaller. 

As TikTok’s algorithm sees users interact with these videos, it is pushed to many people’s For Your Pages, including impressionable children. Kids should not grow up insecure about their bodies. We cannot let the next generations fall for the same beauty standards that have been upheld since the 19th century, and instead, we must normalize looking human. We should have textured skin and hip dips. We should not even have the phrase “hip dips,” stigmatizing this very normal feature, and simply accept how our bodies appear.

As the generation who defines themselves as changemakers and trailblazers, we should not revitalize these harmful notions. It is time to opt for body neutrality. Social media should not prescribe what is best for our health; that will never be its job.