Abstract
The digital age exposes young people to a celebrity-saturated ‘beauty regime’ that reinforces ideals of physical perfection. Cultural sociologists and feminist scholars have highlighted the role of appearance as an important dimension of social stratification and demonstrated the prominence of celebrity images in popular culture and everyday imaginings. While beauty is increasingly recognized as an important element of culture and inequality, research is lacking on how young people understand the contemporary beauty regime and its intersectional complexities. This study explores how diverse Canadian youth navigate this complex landscape, focusing on their interpretations of beauty icon and billionaire Kylie Jenner. We draw from focus groups centred on the following question: How do young people understand beauty and its relationship to privilege and inequality? Our discussions highlight the intersectional nature of beauty and reveal three antinomies that young people navigate in the current beauty regime: (1) an aesthetic tension between fake and natural beauty; (2) a relational tension between elite beauty and democratic accessibility, and (3) a moral tension between looking good and being bad. The beauty bind describes the delicate balancing act young people face when navigating these tensions. Through an intersectional analysis, we aim to deepen scholarly understanding of beauty culture’s evolving dynamics, young people’s understandings of a celebritized beauty regime, and how beauty emerges as a powerful ideal that commands attention even as it often feels painfully out of reach.
Introduction
The digital media landscape bombards young people with carefully curated and celebrity-centred images of idealized beauty, shaping their perceptions of physical appearance and self-worth (Gangneux, 2019; Jarman et al., 2021; Marwick, 2015). These images are part of a complex and shifting beauty regime (Kuipers, 2022), which blurs the line between ‘real’ and manufactured beauty (Alexander, 2010; Elliott, 2011; Rojek, 2015). Young people between the ages of 12 and 18 are in an especially sensitive period of development (Eriksen, 2022; MacIsaac et al., 2018; Tiggemann and Slater, 2017), with teens and young adults disproportionately consuming celebrity images and stylized images online (Gangneux, 2019; Jarman et al., 2021). Yet, we know little about how young people understand and make sense of contemporary beauty ideals and their shifting nature.
Our research builds on past work from cultural sociologists and critical feminist studies, who have offered valuable insights into the social construction and cultural force of beauty (Gill, 2021; Kuipers, 2015; Kuipers et al., 2017; Mears, 2011). These scholars convincingly show how beauty functions as an important source of capital and a dimension of social stratification, highlighting how race, class and gender shape the distribution of social privilege (Anderson et al., 2010; Glenn, 2008; Kuipers, 2015; Mears, 2011; Tate, 2022). This work has also emphasized the dynamic nature of beauty. Indeed, beauty is not a static ‘thing’ or fixed set of ideals, but a shifting system or ‘regime’ in which hierarchies are contested and concretized (Kuipers, 2022). 1
Conceptualizing beauty as a regime aligns with key cultural sociological insights about how meaning systems shape and stratify social life, creating patterns of evaluation and distinction (Bourdieu, 1984). Operating through both explicit and implicit rules, the beauty regime establishes hierarchies of taste and judgement and produces systems of classification that feel natural to social actors while remaining deeply structured by power relations and colonial histories (Hobson, 2005; Tate, 2015, 2016).
Drawing on focus group conversations with Canadian undergraduate students, this study investigates how young people make sense of and negotiate beauty in a demanding, celebrity-soaked culture. Leveraging the case of beauty icon and widely followed billionaire celebrity, Kylie Jenner, 2 we investigate how young people make sense of contemporary beauty ideals. By focusing on Jenner as a prominent beauty icon, we gain valuable insights into the complexities of the beauty regime and its implications for young people’s perceptions of self-worth and understandings of inequality, more broadly.
Focus group discussions reveal that beauty is a highly salient topic in young people’s lives, but also a contested terrain. To capture beauty’s dynamism and diversity, while also mapping its contours, we suggest that beauty can be viewed as a series of cultural antinomies which involve dualistic values or norms (Warde, 1997). These antinomies shape our understanding of beauty as a complex, contradictory area of consumer culture that nonetheless has certain patterns. We document three central antinomies: (1) an aesthetic tension between fake and natural beauty; (2) a relational tension between elite beauty standards and democratically accessible beauty; and (3) a moral tension between looking good and being bad. Navigating these antinomies is challenging work and requires a continuous balancing act that we term, the beauty bind, a heuristic term meant to capture the often-contradictory messaging young people encounter within the beauty regime. Our findings offer an empirically grounded exploration of how young people understand beauty, celebrity and inequality, illuminating beauty’s paradoxical potential to offer a feeling of empowerment and constraint, aspiration and rejection.
Beauty Background
Feminine Beauty Ideals and Intersectionality
Beauty is an important, but oft-overlooked dimension in the sociological study of intersectional inequalities and power. Beauty is neglected, in part, because it is ‘seen as somehow trivial, frivolous or vulgar’ (Menon, 2023: 5). Nevertheless, beauty is both a significant form of capital and a tool to reinforce inequalities (Craig, 2021). As a form of ‘body’ or ‘aesthetic’ capital, physical markers of beauty like youth, skin tone and slenderness (Glenn, 2008; Mears, 2011) return significant rewards like increased earnings (Anderson et al., 2010), as well as favourable evaluations of intelligence and likeability (Han and Laurent, 2023; Klebl et al., 2022). These rewards are shaped by a pervasive ‘“beautiful-is-good” stereotype’ (Dion et al., 1972), while ugliness involves a range of penalties like challenges in the dating and marriage market, and diminished economic and social capital (Schneickert et al., 2020).
Beauty has longstanding associations with femininity, and its rewards and penalties are deeply shaped by gender norms (Kuipers, 2015). As Mears (2015: 23) notes, ‘women and men have differential capacities to profit from the value of their own capital’ and women are encouraged to invest in and benefit from bodily capital. Indeed, women have long been called to work on and perfect their appearance in ways that men have not (Widdows, 2020). Beauty advertising and celebrity culture often promote a limited and idealized beauty standard based on thin, young, White women (Baumann, 2008; Craig, 2002; Elliott, 2011; Mears, 2011; Tate, 2015). Although beauty increasingly affects masculine subjectivities (Foster and Baker, 2023), it remains powerfully connected to feminine identity work (Craig, 2021: 3). This longstanding gendered association has led scholars to critique appearance ideals for their capacity to discipline and restrict women (e.g. Bordo, 1993; Craig’s, 2002; Mears, 2014, 2015; Strings, 2019; Widdows, 2020).
Beauty’s cultural force also reflects deeply embedded racialized structures and colonial legacies. (Craig, 2002, 2006; Hunter, 2005; Menon, 2023; Tate, 2015, 2016; Wood, 2021). Historically, Euro-American beauty ideals have privileged whiteness, reinforcing racist ideologies and practices that dehumanize Black women. The European exhibition of Sarah Baartman as the ‘Hottentot Venus’, beginning in 1810, exemplifies the racist exploitation of Black women’s bodies, fuelled by a cruel blend of hypersexualization and racist disdain (Strings, 2019; Tate, 2015). The colonial construction of Black women as deviant and hypersexual worked to solidify a racial hierarchy that privileged European features, particularly light skin, as markers of social value and moral virtue (Baumann, 2008; Glenn, 2008; Hobson, 2005; Strings, 2019; Tate, 2016, 2022). The enduring preference for light skin, known as colourism, extends beyond aesthetics; it reflects a hierarchy where whiteness grants access to power and resources, a connection that persists in the continued global sale of skin-lightening products (Glenn, 2008; Hunter, 2005; Tate, 2022).
While feminine beauty ideals have longstanding associations with Eurocentric ideals, elements of racialized beauty have been selectively integrated into contemporary beauty norms (Hobson, 2005: 9), highlighting the beauty regime’s fluid, complex nature. This fluidity is evidence in the field of cosmetic surgery, where Menon (2023: 2) notes a shift ‘from a one-size-fits-all approach that has historically promoted a White look for everyone, regardless of racial membership or nationality, to offering multiple, race-specific standards of beauty’. However, signs of greater inclusivity can mask deeper issues of appropriation as when, for example, mainstream and digital media actors selectively adopt cultural markers associated with blackness – such as braided hair, full lips and darker skin – detached from their Black cultural contexts and without citation (Cherid, 2021).
The complexities of incorporating racialized beauty into mainstream ideals are recreated in the digital realm. While navigating potential vulnerabilities, such as the scrutiny of the White gaze and the risk of aesthetic objectification, digital spaces are being leveraged by Black women to challenge Eurocentric beauty standards and actively engage in the ongoing reconstruction of beauty ideals. This resistance draws upon and contributes to a long history of activism and cultural production aimed at dismantling oppressive beauty norms rooted in colonialism and White supremacy (Tate, 2016). As activists and artists develop an anti-racist aesthetic that contributes to the decolonization of beauty (Hobson, 2005; Tate, 2022), they continue to struggle against the commodification of beauty which reinforces racial hierarchies and creates financial barriers to inclusivity (Tate, 2016).
The pursuit of beauty operates within a broader system of inequality that includes gender, race, coloniality and social class. Beauty is deeply intertwined with class inequality, reproducing cultural and moral judgements related to privilege, celebrity and class. Physical appearance, conceptualized as aesthetic capital, can yield economic, symbolic and social standing (Anderson et al., 2010; Kuipers, 2015), while also serving to express social distinctions of taste and value (Wood’s, 2021: 19). Beauty is a form of capital that requires active cultivation and maintenance rather than being a fixed attribute. Women face significant pressure to invest in their appearance, risking penalty and scrutiny if they fail to meet prevailing aesthetic standards (Kuipers, 2015, 2022: 218).
Beauty distinctions are not merely aesthetic but involve significant moral boundary work. (Kuipers, 2015; Mears, 2015; Widdows, 2020). Psychological research reveals a powerful, automatic association between beauty and positive moral traits like goodness and warmth (e.g. Dion et al., 1972; Han and Laurent, 2023; Klebl et al., 2022). Neoliberal cultural narratives reinforce this conflation by emphasizing personal responsibility for beauty, attainable through effort, hard work and consumption (Gill, 2021; Taylor and Johnston, 2014: 134). An attractive appearance has become a marker of ‘self-control, responsibility and moral quality’ (Kuipers, 2022: 218). Media portrayals suggest that medicalized cosmetic enhancements, increasingly normalized alongside celebrity culture, are tools for self-expression and self-improvement available to anyone (Elliott, 2011: 464).
In sum, dominant ideals of beauty are fluid yet inescapable, deeply intersectional and intertwined with the narrow range of bodies and faces prominently featured in celebrity culture. This leads us to ask: How do young people navigate these pervasive and evolving beauty standards?
Young People’s Reception of Beauty Ideals
While scholars have shed light on beauty’s uneven privileges and penalties, sociological investigations into everyday perceptions of beauty’s cultural authority are still relatively sparse (cf., Kuipers, 2015; Milkie, 1999; Taylor and Johnston 2014). This gap is significant as young people are particularly susceptible to appearance ideals, especially given the prominence of appearance-focused content on the digital media spaces they occupy (Foster, 2022; Őry et al., 2022). Existing literature suggests that media messaging plays a powerful role shaping young peoples’ self-esteem (DeBraganza and Hausenblas, 2010; Kholmogorova et al., 2018; Milkie, 1999), with advertisements and beauty images often resulting in negative comparisons and feelings of body dissatisfaction (Borges, 2011; Reaves et al., 2004). Images of celebrities and their often cosmetically enhanced bodies are especially pronounced in our highly visual culture (Alexander, 2010; Rojek, 2015), inviting social comparisons among young people who aspire to look and act as celebrities do (Elliott, 2011; Marwick, 2015).
But beauty ideology is not uniformly injected from on high into fragile young minds – an outmoded hypodermic needle approach to culture. Beauty ideals are part of a dynamic process of critical engagement and social comparison that reflects and refracts the viewer’s social location, including their race, class, gender and age. Milkie’s (1999) classic study of girls and teen magazines found that ‘virtually all’ White girls wanted an appearance resembling media images; they saw these images as artificial and manipulated, but nonetheless relevant for their peer group. In contrast, Black girls saw these images as part of ‘White girls’ culture and less relevant to them – although the protective effect of Black culture from dominant beauty norms has been debated (e.g. Poran, 2006). Exposure to evidence of digital manipulation in beauty images can also mediate the effects of beauty images. Past research suggests that self-perceptions can be ‘improved when presented with evidence of digital manipulation’ and that young people prefer ‘authentic’ and ‘un-retouched’ images of beauty (Milkie, 1999: 207; Reaves et al., 2004).
A preference for ‘authentic’, ‘natural’ beauty images exists in tension with commonplace practices of digital manipulation, especially among young people who routinely use editing tools on platforms like Instagram to conform to idealized beauty standards (Elias et al., 2017; Hearn and Banet-Weiser, 2020). Chae (2017: 375) argues that editing selfies operate as a kind of ‘virtual makeover’, allowing users to construct idealized self-images that may ultimately ‘serve to perpetuate beauty driven society’. Within a visual culture that celebrates and scrutinizes celebrity bodies, digital manipulation has fostered ‘widespread second-order reflections on the “artificial beauty” of [these] bodies’ (Elliott, 2011: 467, 475). Despite widespread awareness of beauty’s constructed nature, digitally manipulated images still powerfully shape cultural standards of attractiveness.
While men increasingly face appearance pressures (Foster and Baker, 2023; Scheibling and Lafrance, 2019), the interplay between authenticity and manipulation in beauty ideals particularly impacts young women, who remain the primary targets of advertising and cultural messages urging them to purchase beauty products. (Kenalemang-Palm, 2024; Piazzesi, 2023; Widdows, 2020: 241). This pressure is further complicated by a neoliberal culture that celebrates a strong, confident and self-investing feminine ideal, making it difficult for young women to acknowledge their vulnerability (Burnette et al., 2017: 120–121; Gill, 2021; Kuipers, 2022: 218). While media literacy campaigns strive to raise awareness of the pressure associated with beauty ideals (Burnette et al., 2017; Hawes et al., 2020), research suggests that media portrayals have a subtle, but profound influence on feelings of self-worth (e.g. Borges, 2011; Chae, 2017). This subtle influence, combined with young people’s awareness of image manipulation, underscores the importance of investigating how beauty ideals presented by celebrity women like Kylie Jenner are received and internalized, especially since beauty is a paradoxical and fraught project.
The Beauty Bind: Embracing Paradox in the Cultural Study of Beauty
Women are enjoined to pursue beauty amidst societal stigma that deems such efforts superficial and vain. This fundamental paradox, noted by earlier feminist scholars (e.g. Gimlin, 2002; McCall, 1992), involves the compulsory feminine pursuit of physical attractiveness alongside negative judgements for paying attention to beauty, thinness and youth (Taylor and Johnston, 2014: 128). The paradoxical nature of the beauty regime (Kuipers, 2022: 218) reflects broader cultural conflicts, like conflicting neoliberal values between discipline and corporeal control on the one hand, and consumer freedom and choice on the other (Cairns and Johnston, 2015a). Negotiating beauty requires women to continually calibrate their efforts, striving for effortless beauty while distancing themselves from a pathologized femininity framed as obsessive and controlling (Cairns and Johnston, 2015b). To capture this tension, we propose the idea of a beauty bind. This concept is intended as a heuristic that encapsulates the beauty paradoxes noted by feminist scholars, as well as the contradictory challenges of beauty observed in young people during our focus group conversations.
Although the paradoxical nature of the beauty bind presents a taxing challenge for women, it has undoubtedly been a boon for beauty products and entrepreneurs promising beautification alongside feminine empowerment, confidence and self-care. Kuipers (2022: 212) notes that the ‘beauty as care’ ideal within the beauty regime ‘connects good looks with health, hygiene, self-care and self-control’. Researchers have extensively documented how beauty discourse adapts to incorporate women’s critiques, all the while selling products promising proximity to its ideals (Glenn, 2008; Johnston and Taylor, 2008; Kenalemang-Palm, 2024; Piazzesi, 2023; Taylor and Johnston, 2014). The language of self-care and empowerment is also used to promote costly med-spa services, blurring the boundary between everyday cosmetics and cosmetic injectables and surgical procedures (Hermans, 2022; Menon, 2023: 7). Bonell et al. (2021) identify a cosmetic surgery paradox whereby unrealistic beauty standards generate demand for surgery, while women simultaneously receive judgement for undergoing these procedures. Medicalized beauty interventions represent the most recent instantiation of a paradoxical beauty bind, and as these practices become more commonplace, it is vital to investigate how cultural norms are shifting (e.g. Berkowitz, 2021).
Despite the challenges this paradoxical beauty bind presents for women, the beauty industry has proven adept at capitalizing on these complexities, often by co-opting critiques of restrictive beauty ideals while simultaneously profiting from them. One strategy is incorporating more variation in the figures and faces represented, even as the pursuit of beauty itself remains paramount (Foster and Pettinicchio, 2021). While there is some evidence of growing acceptance of diverse body types alongside messages on inclusivity and feminine empowerment (Johnston and Taylor, 2008; Menon, 2023), the depth and impact of these changes are contested (e.g. Gill, 2021). Amidst these dynamic and contradictory beautification trends, conceptualizing beauty becomes increasingly challenging. While the overarching beauty bind seems constant, the specifics of what constitutes a beautiful face and body continue to shift and evolve.
Given beauty’s fluid, contested quality, we suggest that it can be usefully captured using the idea of cultural antinomies. Drawing inspiration from British sociologist Alan Warde’s work on the dynamic quality of ‘good’ food (Warde, 1997; Warde and Hirth, 2024), we view beauty as a series of antinomies reflecting its contested cultural authority. Our approach, inspired by Warde’s heuristic use of antinomies, applies this concept to beauty, highlighting three antinomies: aesthetic, relational and moral, based on young people’s perceptions of appearance. These beauty antinomies are not universal attributes but social and historical constructs that vary across time and space. 3 Our focus is on showcasing how these cultural antinomies of beauty emerge in focus group conversations, contributing to literature on beauty ideals in an image-focused age.
Methods
To explore young people’s understandings of beauty and its intersections with inequality, we conducted 12 focus group interviews with 44 students enrolled at the University of Toronto between February 2020 and August 2021. The University of Toronto is a large, highly ranked Canadian institution that encompasses three campuses – St. George, Mississauga and Scarbrough – located on the traditional lands of the Huron-Wendat, the Seneca and the Mississaugas of the Credit. It hosts a diverse student body of nearly 100,000 students (University of Toronto, 2024), mirroring the diversity of the densely populated Greater Toronto Area (GTA). Approximately one-quarter of the students are international students, while many domestic students have transnational ties to linguistic, cultural and religious communities abroad.
We chose focus groups for their ability to elicit rich narratives, emotions and shared cultural meanings among students. This method is particularly well suited to feminist topics that bridge personal experiences with broader social issues (Morgan, 2019; Taylor and Johnston 2014; Wilkinson, 1998). Our sample, recruited through student contacts and word-of-mouth, reflected the diversity of the broader student population. Participants included 12 White, 5 Black, 15 South Asian, 4 Latin/Hispanic and 8 East Asian students, with a majority (36) identifying as female. The average age was 21, and they represented a variety of academic disciplines. To ensure confidentiality, all participants were assigned pseudonyms (Table 1).
Focus group demographics.
The authors moderated focus group discussions which lasted between 75 and 130 minutes. A semi-structured interview guide informed by beauty scholarship was used to initiate and guide conversations. Questions about Kylie Jenner served to anchor discussions about cultural power, appearance, wealth and beauty, but we also asked broader questions on physical appearance, consumer culture and social inequality. Focus group discussions continued until theoretical saturation, yielding 356 single-spaced pages of verbatim transcripts. Data analysis employed an inductive, iterative process guided by constructivist grounded theory (Charmaz, 2006) and Weston et al.’s (2001) framework for collective coding. Sensitizing concepts like compulsory beauty, femininity, class inequality and racial privilege informed initial readings. Through open and focused coding using Dedoose software, we identified salient themes and patterns, ultimately leading to the development of three key ‘antinomies’ that capture the tensions inherent in the beauty regime, and the ‘contradictory cultural accounts that our research subjects evince’ (Pugh, 2013: 43).
Grounded in an interpretive cultural sociological framework (e.g. Pugh, 2013; Spillman, 2002), focus groups provided a valuable method for observing the social construction of beauty. This approach highlights how individual sense-making connects to broader social structures, and we aimed to observe collective meaning-making around representations of ‘beautiful’ people. Following Pugh’s (2013) emphasis on using qualitative data to access participants’ emotional landscapes and social categories, we analyse our focus groups not as a collection of individual opinions, but as a site of social interaction where shared experiences and categories of beauty are felt, recreated and contested.
Findings
Although the beauty regime is shaped by global and historical forces, corporate pressures, celebrity and media culture, the analysis that follows centres on factors deemed most salient by focus group participants. Where possible, we draw connections between focus group discussions and broad, socio-cultural and historical forces informing contemporary beauty ideals. Overall, our inductive analysis of focus group data revealed three antinomies that characterize the beauty regime: aesthetic, relational and moral. While these categories overlap in some respects, we discuss each independently, using these antinomies as a heuristic to outline the tensions at play in young people’s understandings of beauty.
Antinomy #1 Aesthetic: Fake versus Natural Beauty
The first antinomy centres on the aesthetic dimension of beauty – the ‘look’ that was both admired and critiqued in focus groups. 4 The Jenner-Kardashian women are venerated for their beauty but also critiqued for taking their beauty work too far, described with terms like ‘impossibly unrealistic’, ‘plastic’ and ‘fake’. Underlying these mixed feelings is an aesthetic antinomy between naturally occurring beauty and fake, manufactured beauty. 5 The antinomy between natural and fake is wrapped around a paradoxical injunction for women to work on their appearance while avoiding doing too much. As Piazzesi (2023: 17) observes, women are ‘enjoined to do enough – not too little, and not too much – to stay beautiful’. Beautiful women must maintain the ‘illusion of naturalness even while engaging with artifice’ (Bonell et al., 2021: 235; also Davis, 1995). This relates to broader patterns of idealized femininity and ‘calibration’, which requires that women continually negotiate between polarities of self-control and restraint on one axis, and commitment, expenditure and proactive engagement on the other (Cairns and Johnston, 2015a: 154). Excessive conformity to feminine standards may result in being perceived as rigid, uptight, or neurotic, but insufficient adherence generates critiques of laziness, neglect and carelessness (Cairns and Johnston, 2015b). Put simply, idealized femininity demands continual adjustment to an elusive feminine standard.
In keeping with this research, our focus group discussions evoked an uneasy aesthetic tension between natural and artificial beauty, with participants vacillating between an implicit admiration of ‘natural’ beauty and suspicion towards artificiality and excessive manipulation. Despite the positive valuation of naturalness, we observed a clear understanding of ‘fake’ beauty as the normative beauty standard. Put differently, participants described Jenner (and her sisters) as representing and defining a look which is artificial but nonetheless admired. Maysoon described Kylie as ‘a gorgeous lady’, and Loretta said that Kylie and her sisters have ‘defined, I think, for an entire generation of people what the ideal standard of beauty and body type is’. These women are credited with shifting beauty standards away from ‘skinny, skinny, skinny’, as Alainah puts it, and towards a more curvaceous look: ‘the curves matter now, the butt matters now, the boobs matter now’. Cara suggests that a decade ago ‘everyone wanted to be super skinny, and like, no curves’, but that Kylie and her sisters ‘were really the first ones who brought’ an hourglass figure into fashion. Lorena too credits these celebrity women for changing beauty norms, sharing that Kylie and her sisters have ‘changed the way that society perceives beauty’.
While participants generally agree that the Jenner-Kardashians set beauty standards, they also critiqued their cosmetic enhancements, contrasting an ideal of natural beauty with the sisters’ look which is beautiful but not ‘real’. Sarah acknowledges artificiality, stating, ‘Kylie Jenner, the whole Kardashians, like all these celebrities who are rich, if you look at them in the past and see them now, Kylie Jenner especially, we all know that her face is not real.’ Despite suggesting that Jenner ‘looked better before cosmetic interventions’, Sarah also says of Kylie, and ‘everyone that’s rich’, that ‘they’re all beautiful. And it could be natural or plastic, but they’re just all beautiful.’ Indeed, the consensus in discussions was that the Jenner-Kardashian look was artificial and beautiful. Sofia put it this way: ‘I feel like a large part of the Kardashian-Jenner dynasty is not looking like yourself and almost being this amorphous kind of shape shifter.’ This implies a lack of inherent, natural beauty, and highlights the Kardashian-Jenner adeptness at crafting and manipulating beauty. Sofia’s comment about ‘shapeshifting’ was echoed by other participants, with Loretta describing Jenner’s appearance as ‘manufactured’, and Andrea using the term, ‘artificial’. When asked how he would describe Jenner, Brandon shared that ‘fake’ came to mind and moments later, Juliana asserted that Kylie and her sister’s looks were ‘photoshopped’, ‘manipulated’ and ‘staged’. Despite these criticisms, Adila’s statement prevails: ‘Kylie and her sisters are the ones that make the beauty standards today’.
While the Jenner-Kardashian beauty standard was seen as highly manufactured, participants did not express an explicit preference for untouched faces and bodies. Instead, natural beauty served as an implicit reference point used to critique an excessively artificial look. Veering too far from a natural look raised scepticism, but moderate body interventions were considered desirable, commonplace and unremarkable. Gulia says, ‘I don’t think there’s anything wrong with wanting to make yourself look better’ but concedes that Jenner ‘does go to some extremes’. As Gulia’s comments suggest, an artificial look becomes suspect when it falls too far outside the realm of a naturally occurring face or body. Implicit valuations of natural beauty are also apparent when participants discuss ‘extreme’ cosmetic interventions in terms of size and scale. Talking about a picture of Kim Kardashian’s curvaceous bikini-clad body on a beach, Sarah says, ‘I remember fully thinking like, “wow she looks like an ant! But like this is making her money”, I mean, like that’s crazy.’ Sarah mocks Kardashian’s extreme figure, which resembles an ant’s bulbous shape, but believes that this body generates popular interest and revenue. Rachel similarly criticizes Jenner’s lips as excessively big, saying, ‘I think she looked a lot better natural’, but notes, ‘that’s just my opinion, it doesn’t matter’, because ‘I do not think that this society would be buying lip kits from someone whose lips they didn’t think were [beautiful]’. Similarly, Miranda described the beauty ideal set by the Jenner-Kardashian women as, ‘the hourglass figure, the huge fake ass. Like it doesn’t even matter that it’s fake now’.
While natural beauty implicitly informs criticisms of excessive interventions, artificial beauty interventions are simultaneously accepted as integral to prevailing aesthetics. Participants’ comments suggest that criticism is most legitimate at the outer margins where ‘fake’ faces and bodies veer too far away from what is normal or natural. Jenner’s ‘fake’ face and body set the dominant standard for beauty for most participants, and taken together, our discussions reveal a persistent aesthetic antinomy between natural beauty and a ‘fake’, ‘manufactured’ look.
Antinomy #2 Relational: Elite Beauty versus Democratic Beauty for All
A second antinomy revolves around the relational tension between beauty as a universal birthright and a scarce asset associated with elites, especially upper-class White women. Despite the framing of beauty as a meritocratic good that all people should invest in, the stratification of appearance (e.g. Schneickert et al., 2020) in the contemporary beauty regime involves a fundamental relational dimension. Appearance ideals are negotiated in a social space where beauty is determined comparatively and distributed unequally. How do people reconcile the seemingly contradictory notion of beauty as a universal feminine aspiration, and beauty as a kind of scarce capital more likely to accumulate amongst privileged women?
Throughout focus group discussions, participants grappled with this question, sometimes discussing beauty as a universal goal but simultaneously describing it as the birthright of rich women. Wealthy or famous women were almost universally described as beautiful, and these discussions suggest a powerful schematic association between wealth and feminine physical attractiveness. As Sarah states, ‘everyone [female] that’s rich that I know, they’re all beautiful. And it could be natural or plastic, but they’re just all beautiful.’ Othman also connects wealth and beauty, saying that the ‘typical image that comes to my mind of a wealthy, beautiful woman is the more prototypical beauty’, and he contrasts this with daily life which he sees as filled with the ‘unconventional beauty that we know exists around us’. While beauty is a presumed attribute of wealthy women, it is also seen as form of aesthetic capital that can be leveraged to generate fame and generate upward mobility. Sebastian notes, ‘they [beautiful people] will generally have more doors open for them’, a sentiment echoed by Vanessa who asserts that beauty is ‘a factor that will get you to places in which you can make money’.
Beauty and wealth exhibit a reciprocal relationship, allowing for the exchange of economic capital for aesthetic capital and vice versa; as Bourdieu (1986) suggests, various forms of capital are fungible. Adila highlights this connection, imagining feminine ‘faces that look like the beauty standards that we see on social media, because they have the means [money] to get that face’. Describing a ‘rich face’, Adila highlights ‘full lips that they have, like, the money to go get lip fillers [. . .] They have the money like, to purchase expensive makeup’. While beauty can be a pathway to wealth, and wealth can be used to enhance beauty, participants recognize the unequal distribution of both economic and aesthetic capital. Speaking about wealthy women, Maysoon says that ‘we expect them to look a certain way’ in part because ‘they can afford things that the normal individual can’t. They can afford, maybe surgeries. You know, like treatments.’ Loretta describes how the Jenner-Kardashian family have wealth that has allowed them to set ‘the ideal standard of beauty and body type’. Catarina tells the group about a viral meme inspired by Jenner stating, ‘I’m not ugly, I’m just broke’, highlighting her understanding of an essential link between money and beautification. 6
Women of colour were perceived by some participants as especially likely to be priced out of the beauty market, even though contemporary beauty standards appeared to incorporate a curvier, racialized ideal. This shift, however, was not seen as necessarily translating into greater inclusivity or accessibility for women of colour. The Jenner-Kardashian sisters’ beauty was clearly and frequently linked to their full busts, plump lips, narrow waists and round hips, and this body type was seen as most accessible to wealthy woman who can purchase medical interventions. As Aliya explained, ‘women of colour and Black women [. . .] they don’t exactly have the ability or the wealth to fit into the idealized trend of the moment’. Here Aliya recognizes a broader pattern whereby features associated with Black women, such as curvy figures and full lips, are aesthetically embraced, but only after being repackaged and made accessible primarily to those with wealth and access to aesthetic technologies (Tate, 2015).
Unequal access to beauty ideals reinforces the association between beauty and wealth, creating a distinction between those who can afford to embody the desired aesthetic and those who cannot. While beauty and wealth are viewed as a natural pairing, the same is not true of feminine beauty and talent or intelligence. When discussing beautiful women who have become wealthy using social media platforms, Arwa says, ‘if you just have that booty, you are bound to get famous or attract some type of attention’. She describes these women as follows: ‘they don’t really have a lot of talent, but they are very pretty. I don’t want to sound mean, but they are very pretty [. . .] so that’s a huge reason why a lot of people like these girls’. Arwa is hesitant to make a ‘mean’ judgement of a beautiful person’s worth, but nonetheless de-links feminine beauty from skill or talent. Brandon too, hates to sound ‘judgemental’, but says ‘when I think of famous women, they’re all somewhat young and attractive [. . .] they’re rich because they look good. So you kind of associate that [rich] with that [beauty]’. Brandon pauses and tries to think of a successful wealthy woman who is not attractive and struggles: ‘I’m trying to think of someone where I wouldn’t [call them attractive], which sounds terrible, but I can’t think of someone off the top of my head right now’.
Focus group discussions linked feminine wealth with beauty but not talent or intelligence, exposing enduring patriarchal beauty standards. Notably, this double standard was absent for masculinity. Wealthy men are not automatically linked with attractiveness, but are instead imagined as nondescript or even unattractive. Mirna says that wealthy women ‘definitely have to have that, kind of hot, higher standard’, but ‘when I think of the guys, like you can look, however you want [. . .] you think of an old fat guy with the big bellies because they don’t. . . like, you’re secure in your money’. Aubry depicts wealthy men this way: ‘maybe they aren’t necessarily ugly, per se, but they’re not the most attractive. . . they’re like generic White men to me’. In contrast, Aubry says of wealthy women, ‘they’re definitely a standard placed upon women that you need to be beautiful’. Tonya follows up by mentioning Mark Zuckerberg, ‘look at him! You know there’s no pressure on him to look attractive, to look good and to be fit. Nothing’. In contrast, Tonya says that ‘women billionaires or rich women, Kylie Jenner, Rhianna, Kim, whoever. They’re all gorgeous’ and these women ‘put a lot of work in and put a lot of money into their bodies to look that way’. This second antinomy of beauty underscores a classed relationship between wealthy beautiful women and less attractive women with fewer resources, along with a gendered contrast between attractive rich women and relatively unattractive rich men.
Taken together, participants’ reflections on beauty and its relational qualities reveal the complicated emotional terrain surrounding this second antinomy: beauty is associated with elite female bodies and beauty practices that women may hope to emulate but few can achieve. Some participants critiqued the idea that wealthy women can simply ‘buy’ beauty and that non-elite women are less beautiful – and therefore less valued. As Melanie explains of the Kardashian-Jenner sisters, ‘well, they always look flawless, right? They have the money to do that stuff [. . .] I’m never going to look like that’. Melanie believes it is ‘ridiculous’ to compare herself with rich, beautiful women, but nonetheless found herself emotionally caught in this painful comparison. Maadai, a young woman of colour, shares a similar emotional struggle, believing that celebrities like Kylie Jenner set a ‘certain standard of beauty’, but one that makes her ‘feel de-empowered’. When Maadai relates this idea of beauty to herself, she resents the idea that she should either ‘adjust to [Kylie’s] type of beauty’, trying to approximate these standards, or accept the idea ‘that I am not even worth it at all’. Maadai’s observations in this respect echo the voices of Tate’s (2018: 51) interviewees, who identified a sense of shame in the face of beauty standards that position Black women on the outside of a ‘centuries’ old [. . .] opposition between Black ugliness and White beauty’. For our focus group participants, the beauty standard and its association with White, namely upper-class women produced a feeling of exclusion. Priced out by the cost of intensive beauty treatments and a ‘look’ characterized by wealth and privilege, the young people we spoke with rejected the notion that beauty was available to all women.
Antinomy #3 Moral: Looking Good and Being Bad
We observed a third antinomy that involves a moral tension within the contemporary beauty regime: looking good while being bad. On one side of this tension, beauty work is normalized as a compulsory part of normative femininity, with beauty linked to positive moral attributes like goodness (Dion et al., 1972). On the other side, the pursuit of beauty creates moral risks, leading to perceptions of superficiality, vanity and sexual wantonness (Mears, 2015; Piazzesi, 2023; Tanner et al., 2013). Psychological research reveals the complexity of beauty’s moral associations, demonstrating how perceptions of vanity can undermine the positive halo effect of attractiveness and lead to judgements of immorality (Han et al., 2023: 266). Our focus group discussions enrich this research by elaborating the moral risks associated with beauty. Looking good implies success for participants, but the pursuit of beauty also introduces the risk of engaging in harmful behaviour.
Indeed, Kylie Jenner and her sisters face criticism for promoting unattainable beauty standards that can harm women. This harm is amplified by the significant financial burden of emulating their beauty practices and the sisters’ perceived dishonesty about cosmetic enhancements. For instance, Marilyn mocked Jenner’s insistence that her enlarged lips were a natural result of puberty: ‘she kept saying, “oh no, it’s puberty, it’s puberty”, like, “my lips got bigger because of puberty”. It’s like, can they really like triple in size because of puberty? [. . .] I did not hit that [lip] growth spurt!’. Marilyn saw this deceit as harmful, saying that women were hurting themselves trying to replicate Kylie’s signature bee-stinged lips: ‘if you weren’t doing it [trying to achieve this look] you, I don’t even know, like you drop off the surface of the earth. It was a crazy thing.’ Jenner’s lip look was not only seen as unnatural and harmful, but also dishonestly promoted and ubiquitous.
The Jenner-Kardashian body ideal faced similar criticism, as it was seen as promoting an unhealthy relationship with the body. Their endorsement of diet-related teas and ‘waist-training’ corsets served as further evidence that the sisters promoted unhealthy and unrealistic beauty standards. Like Marilyn, Lorena feels that it has been impossible to ignore the body standards that these women have established: ‘you’ll look at her body and you’ll look at her small waist and it’s created unrealistic beauty standards for a lot of girls and we all know that it’s unrealistic, however, we still want to achieve it’.
Some participants critiqued the Jenner-Kardashian sisters’ beauty standards through an intersectional lens that referenced class and gender but also paid particularly attention to race, especially as participants considered the relative ‘goodness’ of these beauty ideals. Criticisms specifically targeted a selective appropriation of Black beauty and body ideals, what Hobson (2016: 16) has described as ‘the cooptation of black women’s various aesthetic expressions and styles by the dominant culture’. Loretta highlighted the significant economic and racial distance separating the Kardashian-Jenner sisters from the lived reality of many Black women:
I think that the Kardashians really do kind of position themselves in close proximity to blackness without having to experience any of the things that Black people actually have to experience [. . .] the Kardashians and the Jenners have worn, like, cornrows, and have rebranded it as something unique to them, but the Kardashians don’t have to worry about losing their job or being told that they look unprofessional for doing things that they’ve decided are trendy, when they decide it’s trendy.
Other participants also believed that the sisters’ proximity to blackness was a strategic and exploitative strategy of self-promotion. Aliyah explains that Kylie and her sisters, ‘darken their skin and appropriate certain aspects of Black culture to try and a get a higher social standing’. Andrea makes a similar criticism saying,
I feel like she [Kylie] really profited off of African American culture from like the way she looks over time. Her skin got a lot darker. Her lips – lip injections. The way her body looks, like all the body surgeries she did. The way she does her hair; she does cornrows a lot.
Troubled by Kylie and her sisters’ outward presentation and strategic body augmentation, these focus group participants offered challenges against the uneven distribution of race- and class-based privilege.
Focus group participants like Loretta, Aliya and Andrea also established critical linkages between the racial politics of beauty and the strategic acquisition and use of aesthetic capital. Their critiques underscore how the Kardashian-Jenner association with (and detachment from) blackness enables them to reap economic and symbolic advantages while avoiding the realities of racism and economic marginalization (see Jackson, 2019). Tate (2016: 56) makes a similar observation in her work on Black beauty and racial aesthetics, noting that procedures designed to ‘reproduce what are seen to be “Blacker” lips and bottoms on white bodies’ are often regarded positively, while Black women’s bodies are read in less flattering terms. The young people we spoke with were sensitive to this dynamic, describing the appropriation of what are perceived to be Black beauty norms as suspect and inappropriate. Our focus group discussions reveal how a beautiful look can be aesthetically appreciated (See Antimony #1), but morally contested when it involves cultural appropriation. Vanessa’s comment aptly summarizes this moral critique:
[Kylie Jenner] strives to have stereotypical features of an African-American woman, physically speaking. And we were talking about earlier how her appearance plays a role in how successful her business is [. . .] So she’s definitely profiting off of her appearance, her looks and I think that some of that credit should be given to African-American women.
Vanessa’s comments reveal an additional dimension of the moral critique of Kardashian-Jenner beauty project: stereotyping. While questioning the insensitive appropriation of Black women’s bodies, participants raised concerns about an essentialized presentation of Black women and their bodies. Marilyn states: ‘I do feel like they definitely did grab those elements of African-American culture, and did make, not necessarily their own, but I do think that they put forward almost, like, a caricature kind of thing.’ Sofia criticizes the caricature-like presentation of Black women, which she sees as reproducing stereotypical and essentialized ideas of Black women. Describing how Jenner borrows from Black culture, she hesitates to call it cultural appropriation, saying, ‘I don’t know if I would say [it is] cultural appropriation, because I feel like it’s demeaning to say that Black culture is simply having big lips and whatever. Like, there’s more to it than that.’ Taken together, Marilyn and Sofia’s comments provide a site for resisting not only the intensive pressures peddled by celebrities like Jenner and her sisters, but also the stereotyping of Black women and their bodies amidst shifting beauty norms.
Focus group interviewees’ reflections reveal moral tensions involving cultural appropriation, stereotyping, and objectification. Although beauty is seen as important, even compulsory, achieving beauty involves a delicate balancing act, or what we call a beauty bind. Putting effort into beauty is morally good, but beauty projects can draw moral disapprobation – especially when the beauty ideals, like those of the Jenner-Kardashian sisters, are seen as impossible to achieve or racially insensitive. This tension highlights the complex, often contradictory moral landscape that young people navigate as they negotiate beauty standards.
Discussion and Conclusion
Focus group conversations provide a window into how young people understand and make sense of a shifting beauty regime shaped by our celebrity-focused culture. These conversations revealed the centrality of beauty as a cultural benchmark for feminine self-worth and identity. Beauty was a topic with material resonance and tremendous symbolic power, shaping everyday practices and understandings of attractiveness, ugliness and acceptable femininity. Navigating a beauty regime centred on feminine appearance presents a formidable challenge, encapsulated in the concept of a beauty bind. This concept extends Kuipers’ (2022) regime framework by showing how beauty’s cultural power operates through a series of complex, often contradictory aesthetic, relational and moral antinomies that are embedded in everyday conversations about beauty.
In focus group discussions, Jenner provided a productive case study of the beauty bind. While she embodies dominant beauty standards, she is also criticized as fake, privileged and racially exploitative. Jenner represents a schema of a wealthy woman that emerged inductively in our focus groups: a feminine figure who rises to the top because of looks, wealth and privilege, not talent or intellect. However, the beauty bind extends far beyond Jenner and her celebrity sisters. The women in our focus groups also grappled with conflicting pressures to conform to dominant ideals of beauty, while being constrained by aesthetic and economic capital, as well as racial privilege. Viewing beauty as a bind reveals its complexity as neither a straightforward path to female subjugation nor emancipation, but rather a tangled knot from which women find it difficult to disengage.
Our findings capture beauty’s complex privileges, as well as the emotional toll inflicted on women. Beautification is presented as essential for successful femininity, yet fails to signify intellectual prowess or talent. Beauty’s unequal distribution, intertwined with wealth disparities, renders it a costly and often unattainable ideal. As Gill (2021) observes, women’s engagement with beauty ideals, compared to men’s appears socially compulsory and emotionally charged. Echoing this sentiment, Piazzesi (2023: 179) argues that ‘beauty at once qualifies and disqualifies women as feminine’, shoring up distinctions between men and women in the gender order.
Young women are consistent targets of the beauty industry, yet scholarship often overlooks their perceptions and understandings, eliding the pressures they face in response to beauty messaging as well as their critical perspectives. Our findings extend the literature on cultural-sociological and feminist approaches to beauty, highlighting the significance of taken-for-granted pop-culture trends that could be dismissed as trivial, especially from patriarchal perspectives that fail to recognize the social and cultural pressures underpinning these concerns (Elias et al., 2017; Gimlin, 2002; Grindstaff, 2008; McCall, 1992; Tanner et al., 2013).
Our research provides insight into how beauty ideals are understood, internalized and challenged in everyday life. Specifically, we bridge micro-level phenomena, like everyday sense-making strategies among young people, and macro-level structures and systems of inequality. Cultural sociologists are uniquely equipped to do this work, with a breadth of tools designed to uncover and critically engage with the material power and politics of taken-for-granted objects, representations and rituals (Grindstaff, 2008).
Our findings illuminate how beauty regimes operate through intersecting systems of social privilege, revealing what Kuipers (2022) theorizes as the regime’s power to create hierarchies of visibility and value. Within these hierarchies, some women are made highly visible (and valued), while others remain hidden from view (Hunter, 2005; Mears, 2014; Wood, 2021). As participants highlighted, visibility often translates into tangible benefits, particularly for those who conform to dominant beauty standards. For these women, beauty functions as a form of capital, yielding social and economic advantages (Anderson et al., 2010). As our conversations also made clear, beauty is not a democratic entitlement available to all, but a standard most easily achieved by those with class, race and body privilege. This privilege is compounded by the fact that achieving contemporary beauty standards often necessitates significant financial investment in aesthetic practices and products (Kuipers, 2022). Echoing Cottom (2019: 56), participants often recognized that beauty is not necessarily ‘good capital’, as it ‘compounds the oppression of gender’, and reinforces negative associations between femininity, superficiality and vanity. While beauty can offer certain advantages, it also reinforces a schema of feminine success tied primarily to physical attractiveness and rooted in a historical legacy that privileges whiteness.
While many of our focus group participants were resigned to a beauty standard defined by celebrity figures and characterized by some degree of intervention, conversations revealed beauty to be deeply contested terrain. This contestation illustrates how beauty regimes, as Kuipers (2022) theorizes, continually incorporate and adapt to maintain their relevance. As she explains, the democratization of beauty has not resulted in greater equality but has instead fuelled a self-reinforcing cycle of ever-higher standards. Indeed, our participants levied criticisms against the Jenner-Kardashians for setting unrealistic beauty standards, rejecting excessive interventions. They were especially critical of the ways in which beauty ideals effectively price some women out of the beauty market and resisted the cultural appropriation of beauty standards associated with blackness (Tate, 2016). Alongside these critiques, many women told us that they found it difficult or impossible to remove themselves from conversations about beauty and feminine worth, seeing these standards as an inevitable way that they judged themselves and were judged by others. This finding aligns with scholarship that notes an intensification of pressure to conform to beauty ideals (Kuipers, 2022; Tanner et al., 2013).
Taken together, participants’ narratives and critiques have far-reaching implications for our understanding of beauty politics in global celebrity culture. Beauty is, as Craig (2021) reminds us, deeply political: ‘it is the prize claimed by the victors of struggles over human worth’. So often, these victors are already ‘at the top of social hierarchies’ and ‘assert superiority over groups they deem inferior and therefore ugly’ (Craig, 2021: 3). Beauty then, is a key mechanism through which existing social inequalities are reinforced and reproduced. But beauty, as our focus group discussions reveal, is also a site for resistance and change in the collective body politic. How do we make sense of this paradox?
Our concept of the ‘beauty bind’ offers a framework for understanding how beauty regimes maintain their power even in the face of active resistance. Participants offered sophisticated critiques of celebrity beauty culture yet acknowledged their continued adherence to its standards, illustrating how beauty regimes can persist precisely by absorbing and accommodating criticism while maintaining their organizing force. This dynamic was particularly evident in how young people challenge beauty’s racial and economic exclusions while still operating within its broader framework. The beauty bind thus illuminates how beauty functions as both a mechanism of social inequality and a terrain for challenging established hierarchies – not as separate phenomena, but as dialectically linked processes. Like other cultural classification systems, beauty operates through cultural frameworks that simultaneously enable and constrain social action. The beauty bind reveals the specific mechanisms and cultural antinomies through which a duality of constraint and contestation is enacted and maintained.
While our focus group discussions centred on feminine beauty, we acknowledge that physical appearance pressures also extend to masculinity. Further work is needed to capture the dynamic field of idealized masculine appearances. As Widdows (2020: 234) observes, ‘men too are beautifying and becoming “to be looked at”, and increasingly falling under the beauty ideal’. Gendered messages are changing, with corporations expanding their reach into the world of men’s beauty and body practices (Foster and Baker, 2023; Scheibling and Lafrance, 2019). Though our focus group discussions suggest that masculine appearance ideals are less powerfully linked to wealth and success, more research is needed to unpack how men of varying social locations respond to, manage and incorporate contemporary injunctions to enhance their faces and bodies.
Our findings suggest that race plays a vital, albeit complex role in our shifting beauty culture. Participants criticized the narrow, negative, often stereotypical ways that Black appearance ideals were appropriated in the Jenner-Kardashian aesthetic. Additionally, participants’ observations reinforced the authoritative power of European features, even within our ethnically diverse sample. Future research should explore the selective incorporation of diverse body ideals alongside persistent Eurocentricity, especially in the larger global context of beauty and body modification, and against the increasingly transnational flow of appearance ideals (Glenn, 2008). Menon’s (2023) research on global cosmetic surgery suggests a partial decoupling of contemporary beauty ideals from Eurocentrism, favouring regionally specific, ethno-racial ideals, while Widdows (2020) offers a contrasting view, positing a convergence towards a singular global aesthetic. These studies raise important questions about how beauty regimes operate transnationally, suggesting that Kuipers’ (2022) conceptualization of beauty regimes must be situated within local, national and global contexts. In conjunction with our own findings, this points to the utility of further research surrounding the enduring legacy of European colonial racial hierarchies (Hobson, 2005; Tate, 2016), as well as their permutation over time.
Footnotes
Funding
This research was supported by funding from the Peel Social Lab at the Department of Sociology, University of Toronto Mississauga.
