If you pick up a dictionary and look up “most ridiculous beauty test in existence,” you’ll find yourself looking at Asia’s Finger Trap Beauty test. Fine, it may not be in the dictionary, but that’s certainly how we feel about a “test” that judges beauty based on whether you have a tall nose, a small jaw and really long fingers.
Twenty-four-year-old journalist Esther Honig seems to be on the same page as us about these ridiculous and unattainable standards of beauty. Honig recently did a experiment about ideal beauty around the world and the results reinforce what we’ve believed in all these years: There is no one standard of beauty.
Think about it. If the Asian Finger Trap test determines beauty, then what about those, like myself, who don’t pass this test? Does this mean we should go cry ourselves to sleep because no one will ever find us attractive?
Nope, I don’t think so.
Honig recognized that one person’s perception of beauty is completely different from the next. How can we think of a single test as the all-knowing judge of beauty when the definition of beauty is constantly changing? In Asia there’s the finger trap test, but in America there’s the “thigh gap” obsession. Clearly, those are two very different scales and yet they both “determine” beauty. Confused? You should be.
To prove her point, Honig contacted 40 Photoshop-savvy individuals from more than 25 different countries. Their task was simple: edit her photo and make her beautiful.
The results blew her away. All the Photoshopped images were drastically different from one another.
“I hope this forces viewers to reconsider their concept of beauty and the expectations they hold themselves to,” Honig says. “When we compare unobtainable standards on a global scale, achieving the ideal remains all that more elusive. It almost neutralizes the belief in a universal beauty.”
So the next time you feel ugly because your strong eyebrows simply can’t conform to the trendy short and straight “K-pop eyebrows,” remember in India, you’d be gorgeous.
You’re welcome.
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