P004
_World_Beauty_Standards
The original idea for this site was very different.
It started when a friend and I were talking about beauty standards. We knew what was "attractive" varied across cultures, and thought it would be fun if you were able to somehow find out where you were most attractive in the world, based on your height, weight, hair color, skin tone, face shape, accent, etc.
I thought it would be fascinating to build and learn about, and so I dove into the topic. I wanted to make a tool where you either take a selfie, or answer a few questions about what you look like, and the tool would tell you what country or region you would statistically be considered the hottest.
It seemed simple enough at first. Creating a form to collect that data is easy, I just need to know what questions to ask to build a proper profile of a person's physical characteristics, and then break down what parts of the world find those characteristics attractive.
So first, I found and copied a list of all the countries in the world, and started googling each one. I started with the USA, and nearby places like Canada and Mexico - but I almost instantly ran into a wall. There are different cultures within America - for instance the East Coast and West Coast. New York City vs. Los Angeles. Rural vs. Urban.
Within a country as large as the USA, there's a lot of variability, but after a bit of internet hunting I was sure I could solve that issue. I found a book called The Nine Nations of North America - I didn't read it (lmao) but I did dig into the topic and read the summary on Wikipedia. It loosely breaks the USA into distinct cultures, and connects them with Canada and Mexico when the cultures tend to overlap more.
Great, North American countries are too big, but now I've broken them down. I assumed it would also be an issue I would encounter when trying to break down places like India, China, Russia, Japan, etc. - Other places with large populations or land areas.
But then I started googling again, and ran into more walls. Not much comes up when you search "New England beauty standards" - so I started looking for anywhere I could learn more about human attraction broadly: books, studies, or any website similar to what I wanted to build.
The only thing I found that seemed broad enough to help me was a textbook called "Beauty around the World: A Cultural Encyclopedia" - so I got ahold of it and started digging in. I fixated pretty hard, and after only a couple chapters of the book, I realized the "Where am I hottest?" tool I wanted to build would be extremely difficult.
I learned how beauty standards are imposed much more on women, and how they vary widely across time and culture for women - whereas there's much less definition and variability for men. I learned how different subcultures and age groups develop different beauty standards, and how they're still actively changing - which showed me how difficult it would be to categorize and keep up with it all.
But most importantly, I learned how one of the only universal rules of beauty standards is similarity to the norm. Being physically the "average" of what others in your culture look like is generally considered attractive - which means that if I did still somehow manage to create this website, if you were Pakistani, it would almost always tell you that you were most attractive in Pakistan.
Duh.
So the original idea for the site was dead, but I was still learning so much from this textbook. Beauty standards became the niche interest I bring up in every conversation I have, and most people seemed to find it interesting too. So I thought an educational tool would still be valuable to build, even if it didn't do something as fun as tell you where you were hottest.
Since there's such a wide array of beauty standards, and many aren't documented, the textbook taught mostly by anecdote. It gave dozens of examples of small and large cultures, and how they sexualized other men and women. It showed varying standards across location and time - and I thought that information would fit very neatly into a map. You click on a part of the world, it tells you what the standards are - and there are different maps for different time periods.
So, I read the textbook twice, took notes, summarized the notes, and compiled them into beautystandards.org.
After it was done, I wanted to get it out into the world, so I did a little creative marketing on Reddit. I made a post compiling the coolest things I learned from the textbook on r/beauty, and briefly mentioned the website I made at the end. i didn't link anything, and I tried to make the post as non-self-promotional as possible.
My post did well, ending up with 213 upvotes. (It's on my old reddit account - this is my new one) Eventually, someone asked in the comments about the website I mentioned, and I responded to that comment with the link. That tiny little link in one comment led to around 200 site visitors, and over time, I guess word has gotten out, because the site gets around 200 visits per month.
The Reddit post itself also likely acts as a permanent source of traffic, because Reddit posts often show up in Google searches.
I've got no future plans, for the site - I might make it cuter and mobile accessible at some point - but for now I'll leave you with the most interesting thing I learned reading that beauty standards textbook.
Beauty standards, across cultures, and across time, have very little similarity. Many will say there's an evolutionary argument for why certain things are attractive - "wide hips are better for birthing" "big breasts are better for feeding children" - to justify what they find attractive as "natural", but there's no evidence to support that theory.
As of the time I'm writing this, round, defined, large butts are attractive on younger women in mainstream western culture. During my parent's generation, large butts were considered "fat" and unattractive. Within the same culture, in a matter of 30 or so years, the standard reversed.
Beauty standards are learned, not naturally innate.
And there were only three universally attractive features the book was able to identify, across dozens and dozens of different cultural examples:
The last one was what blew my mind the most. In the past, it was royalty that defined beauty standards. When royals used to dress certain ways, accentuated certain parts of their bodies, or sexualized certain behaviors or characteristics, the rest of that society followed suit, and found the same things attractive.
Now, the same rule seems to apply closely to influencers, actors, and models. The Kardashians, for example, define a lot of what is considered attractive in young women. Timothée Chalamet became superstar popular, and defined his own sub-mainstream beauty standard for young men.
We find certain things are attractive because society has told us they're desirable.
For me at least, that put a new lens on how I approach what is "normal" and "natural."
The original idea for this site was very different.
It started when a friend and I were talking about beauty standards. We knew what was "attractive" varied across cultures, and thought it would be fun if you were able to somehow find out where you were most attractive in the world, based on your height, weight, hair color, skin tone, face shape, accent, etc.
I thought it would be fascinating to build and learn about, and so I dove into the topic. I wanted to make a tool where you either take a selfie, or answer a few questions about what you look like, and the tool would tell you what country or region you would statistically be considered the hottest.
It seemed simple enough at first. Creating a form to collect that data is easy, I just need to know what questions to ask to build a proper profile of a person's physical characteristics, and then break down what parts of the world find those characteristics attractive.
So first, I found and copied a list of all the countries in the world, and started googling each one. I started with the USA, and nearby places like Canada and Mexico - but I almost instantly ran into a wall. There are different cultures within America - for instance the East Coast and West Coast. New York City vs. Los Angeles. Rural vs. Urban.
Within a country as large as the USA, there's a lot of variability, but after a bit of internet hunting I was sure I could solve that issue. I found a book called The Nine Nations of North America - I didn't read it (lmao) but I did dig into the topic and read the summary on Wikipedia. It loosely breaks the USA into distinct cultures, and connects them with Canada and Mexico when the cultures tend to overlap more.
Great, North American countries are too big, but now I've broken them down. I assumed it would also be an issue I would encounter when trying to break down places like India, China, Russia, Japan, etc. - Other places with large populations or land areas.
But then I started googling again, and ran into more walls. Not much comes up when you search "New England beauty standards" - so I started looking for anywhere I could learn more about human attraction broadly: books, studies, or any website similar to what I wanted to build.
The only thing I found that seemed broad enough to help me was a textbook called "Beauty around the World: A Cultural Encyclopedia" - so I got ahold of it and started digging in. I fixated pretty hard, and after only a couple chapters of the book, I realized the "Where am I hottest?" tool I wanted to build would be extremely difficult.
I learned how beauty standards are imposed much more on women, and how they vary widely across time and culture for women - whereas there's much less definition and variability for men. I learned how different subcultures and age groups develop different beauty standards, and how they're still actively changing - which showed me how difficult it would be to categorize and keep up with it all.
But most importantly, I learned how one of the only universal rules of beauty standards is similarity to the norm. Being physically the "average" of what others in your culture look like is generally considered attractive - which means that if I did still somehow manage to create this website, if you were Pakistani, it would almost always tell you that you were most attractive in Pakistan.
Duh.
So the original idea for the site was dead, but I was still learning so much from this textbook. Beauty standards became the niche interest I bring up in every conversation I have, and most people seemed to find it interesting too. So I thought an educational tool would still be valuable to build, even if it didn't do something as fun as tell you where you were hottest.
Since there's such a wide array of beauty standards, and many aren't documented, the textbook taught mostly by anecdote. It gave dozens of examples of small and large cultures, and how they sexualized other men and women. It showed varying standards across location and time - and I thought that information would fit very neatly into a map. You click on a part of the world, it tells you what the standards are - and there are different maps for different time periods.
So, I read the textbook twice, took notes, summarized the notes, and compiled them into beautystandards.org.
After it was done, I wanted to get it out into the world, so I did a little creative marketing on Reddit. I made a post compiling the coolest things I learned from the textbook on r/beauty, and briefly mentioned the website I made at the end. i didn't link anything, and I tried to make the post as non-self-promotional as possible.
My post did well, ending up with 213 upvotes. (It's on my old reddit account - this is my new one) Eventually, someone asked in the comments about the website I mentioned, and I responded to that comment with the link. That tiny little link in one comment led to around 200 site visitors, and over time, I guess word has gotten out, because the site gets around 200 visits per month.
The Reddit post itself also likely acts as a permanent source of traffic, because Reddit posts often show up in Google searches.
I've got no future plans, for the site - I might make it cuter and mobile accessible at some point - but for now I'll leave you with the most interesting thing I learned reading that beauty standards textbook.
Beauty standards, across cultures, and across time, have very little similarity. Many will say there's an evolutionary argument for why certain things are attractive - "wide hips are better for birthing" "big breasts are better for feeding children" - to justify what they find attractive as "natural", but there's no evidence to support that theory.
As of the time I'm writing this, round, defined, large butts are attractive on younger women in mainstream western culture. During my parent's generation, large butts were considered "fat" and unattractive. Within the same culture, in a matter of 30 or so years, the standard reversed.
Beauty standards are learned, not naturally innate.
And there were only three universally attractive features the book was able to identify, across dozens and dozens of different cultural examples:
The last one was what blew my mind the most. In the past, it was royalty that defined beauty standards. When royals used to dress certain ways, accentuated certain parts of their bodies, or sexualized certain behaviors or characteristics, the rest of that society followed suit, and found the same things attractive.
Now, the same rule seems to apply closely to influencers, actors, and models. The Kardashians, for example, define a lot of what is considered attractive in young women. Timothée Chalamet became superstar popular, and defined his own sub-mainstream beauty standard for young men.
We find certain things are attractive because society has told us they're desirable.
For me at least, that put a new lens on how I approach what is "normal" and "natural."