When Ashton Garrison was just seven years old, he asked his mother to get liposuction.
She remembers getting gifted waist trainers and even buying some herself, all before she started high school.
And also remember the impact of seeing ads for weight loss products on your social networks.
“I would cry wondering why I couldn’t just take a pair of scissors and cut off my fat,” says Garrison.
Now, at 14, Garrison can identify harmful beauty ideals, such as associating beauty with thin white girls, for example, they were featured to her in movies, magazines and TV shows.
Her peers, who learned the same standards, bullied her because of her size and treated her differently because of her coarser hair texture and darker complexion.
Garrison, like many Americans, suffered from the mental health effects of not feeling well enough and turned to products like shapewear as a remedy.
“I used to wear a waist trainer all the time, and I don’t anymore,” she says.
Fortunately, she is much more accepting of herself these days, but the same cannot be said for many in the US.
The cost of harmful beauty standards
Beauty standards cost Americans more than $300 billion in 2019, according to Dove’s “The Real Cost of Beauty Ideals” report.
This number includes costs for treatments such as skin bleaching and chemical hair straightening.
Dove commissioned Deloitte Access Economics to compile the report that delves into the economic and social cost of unhealthy beauty standards on Americans aged 10 and older.
Unhealthy beauty ideals, as defined by the report, are beauty standards that are narrow and unrealistic.
They typically only reflect white standards and lack diversity of all sizes, ages, skin tones, hair types, and body shapes.
“It’s [the report] estimates the number of people who were affected by body dissatisfaction and discrimination based on appearance, and then we looked at all the impacts,” says Simone Cheung, a partner at Deloitte Access Economics who leads the Social Policy and Health Economics team. in Sydney, Australia.
“So what we do is, [we estimate] the costs of each of these impacts individually.
According to the report, 16% of the US population age 10 and older (45 million people) experienced body dissatisfaction.
And in general, women bore the highest financial costs of body dissatisfaction and discrimination based on appearance.
“Body dissatisfaction really gets to the core of how someone feels about themselves,” says S. Bryn Austin, lead researcher on the report and founding director of the Strategic Training Initiative for Eating Disorder Prevention (STRIPED): an incubator in public health at the Harvard Chan School of Public Health.
“Your identity may be wrapped up in this. When body dissatisfaction persists, when it’s severe, that can increase someone’s risk of developing depression, anxiety [and] eating disorders. It also increases the risks of substance use and other risky behaviors.”
A closer look at the price of exclusion
The researchers studied outcomes associated with body dissatisfaction (depression, alcohol and drug abuse) to calculate financial impacts, such as health system costs, productivity and efficiency losses.
At $84 billion, the financial costs of body dissatisfaction could have covered a full academic year of tuition, fees, and room and board for 2.9 million college students in America.
“What if this money that is basically going out the window because of these harmful beauty ideals was spent on something else?” Austin asks.
Additionally, at least 66 million people in the country faced discrimination based on appearance in the same year, and their financial and welfare expenses collectively cost Americans $501 billion in 2019.
People who experienced discrimination based on appearance endured difficulties such as:
Weight discrimination (34 million) Skin tone discrimination (27 million) Natural hair discrimination (5 million)
Two-thirds of the national out-of-pocket expenses for health care in the country could have been paid for by the financial costs of discrimination based on appearance.
“If you could prevent or reduce the number of people experiencing body dissatisfaction by just 10%, for example, you could potentially save more than $8 billion in financial costs,” says Cheung.
And the same approach to weight and skin tone discrimination in the black community could save more than $25 billion, it adds. “It is an expense that could be diverted to other social and health issues.”
The report only looks at data from 2019, but Cheung notes that the pandemic may have affected figures for 2020 and beyond. And if inflation is factored in, the price of body dissatisfaction and discrimination based on appearance would be even higher, he says.
Reduce the impact of unhealthy beauty ideals
“The costs associated with these impacts are actually borne by everyone. So it’s not just an individual cost. It costs the government, family and friends, employers, private health insurers, and society,” says Cheung. .
“So when you think about investing, everyone has a role to play in addressing the underlying forces that promote and propagate harmful beauty ideals.”
Here are some actions that could be taken to reduce the cost of harmful beauty standards in America, according to the report:
Promoting safer digital spacesMental health support servicesFocusing on diversity in advertisingMonitoring the sale of harmful productsEducation in schools to promote body confidenceTax incentives and laws to end appearance-based discriminationSocial media literacy
“It’s extremely important to have that representation because for a long time we’ve seen skinny white models or skinny white actresses as the norm. And of course you don’t have to hate them,” says Garrison.
“But honestly, I think it’s about time we saw someone who looks like Lizzo or me, to see more BIPOC people come out and show themselves. More plus size people. And I’m talking about all the brown girls. Southern girls Asian girls, black girls, indigenous girls, Afro-Latin girls. Everyone who is big and brown deserves to feel beautiful and be seen in the media.”
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Source: news.google.com