The Ever-Changing Ideal: A Story of Beauty Through the Ages

Plato once said, “Beauty isn't fixed; but ever-evolving.” 

Women's bodies have played a central role in this fascinating story. Art, philosophy, and culture have all influenced how we define beauty throughout history.

Today, beauty standards are driven by media and social norms. But it wasn't always this way. Let's take a trip down memory lane and see how the "perfect" female form has transformed.

In the beginning, there were the Venus figurines. These full-bodied figures were the epitome of beauty. Fast forward to ancient Greece, and curvy women with wide hips and full breasts reigned supreme. Think of the statue of Aphrodite, the goddess of love herself. Similar ideals held sway in India, with sculptures showcasing women with ample curves and "lotus eyes."

For centuries, beauty was synonymous with health and fertility. But times changed. The Renaissance brought a shift towards slender figures, as seen in Botticelli's "The Birth of Venus." India, too, saw a change with the depiction of goddesses like Parvati, who had a slender build but retained her curves.

Today's story is a different one. Pop culture and social media dictate a much thinner ideal. The pressure to be slim often clashes with a woman's natural biology. Studies show a worrying trend – most women are unhappy with their bodies and strive for unrealistic thinness. This obsession with thinness comes at a cost, with eating disorders and cosmetic surgeries becoming alarmingly common.

The message is clear: Beauty standards are a product of culture, not nature. Once a symbol of prosperity and health, curves are now something to be hidden. But here's the good news: history shows us that beauty ideals are not set in stone. They change, and so can our perception.

So, this Women's Day, celebrate your curves! Embrace your body and remember – true beauty lies in being healthy and confident, no matter your shape or size.

According to Plato, beauty is not constant or stagnant; it is eternal, ever-changing, and universal. Under this definition, a woman’s body played a crucial role in producing art, evoking philosophy, and propagating ideals of beauty through the ages. 

Today, most anthropologists agree that beauty is culturally driven and subjective; in other words, there is no absolute definition of ideals of beauty. Today norms of beauty are driven by various social processes and media. By looking at examples from our past, we can appreciate the fact modern notions of beauty are of a recent nature and female body imaging is not static. 

The ideal female body and its conception have changed a lot since the Venus figurines were first conceived. Once, a full-bodied Venus was the archetype of beauty however, today, many cultures worship the unsustainable stick thin, and toned form as an ideal.In the past many cultures have tried to define the perfect human form, starting with the ancient Greeks, where men had perfectly chiseled and athletic bodies, and women were more desirable if they supported fuller figures. A similarity can be drawn between the Venuses and the ideal women of ancient Greece with their large hips, full breasts and a stomach undefined by their abdominal muscles. These traits can easily be found on the statues of Goddess Aphrodite, the Goddess of beauty and love and the epitome of female beauty. These standards of fuller figures for women remained consistent till about the Italian Renaissance, as can be seen in Botticelli’s iconic painting ‘The Birth of Venus’.</p> <p>Similar comparisons and traits can be traced in the Indian subcontinent and its depiction of ideal forms of feminine beauty. According to Dhavalikar, the first representations of women come from the Mauryan age. These images again show women with large breasts, wide hips, and tapering legs. During the Sunga period from the first century BCE, women were portrayed with elaborate hairstyles, round breasts, thinner waits, and wide hips. The figures here lose their dynamism and are stiffer in their representation. This stiffness is lost half a century later wherein the women portrayed at Sanchi have been contorted to ‘S shape’. During the Kushan period, standardization was seen in the way women were represented. Besides being depicted in an ‘S’ form, eyes were placed at exactly two-thirds of the way up on the face, the bottom of the breast was placed one head height below the chin, the whole figure stood seven heads high, and the head was more rounder in depiction. These were the idealized formats of beauty and were not natural. Another interesting representation is the portrayal&nbsp; of Goddess Parvati. She has been imagined to be the personification of absolute desirable beauty. She is represented with a slender body, rounded hips and a face compared to the moon, possibly to indicate that she glows with youthfulness and vitality. Her facial features have also been given much attention, with eyes like the lotus, lower lip like that of a Bimba, nose like a parrot’s beak. A lot can be gathered by studying the sculptures of women from ancient India. From these studies a consistency is observed in the standards of beauty for women in India, where women with wider hips, thinner waits for globular full breasts, and lotus eyes are regarded as beautiful. From Shringarashata of 5 century CE, the ideals of beauty can be summarized as The coral beauty of her lower lip, Those twin globes, and her breasts, Rising high in the pride of youth.Her navels are hollow, and her diminutive waist; Her hair by nature’s own hand curled; However, of late in recent years, these age-old ideas of beauty in India have also changed. They are becoming more inclined toward the Western standards of beauty, possibly due to increased globalization and conforming to Westernization processes. Ideas of beauty have been biologically and culturally driven in the past, and even though representations of the human body have changed in the past, beauty has never been about being slim. Today these ideas have been changed; women and people in general are far less concerned about fertility, thus, biology, or the need for procreation, is no longer a driving attraction. Earlier fertility was a sign of beauty; since this is no longer the case, culture and; society dictate what is desirable today. Pop culture and social media exercise greater control over how women perceive their bodies and self-images. Most of these advocate thinner frames which goes against the natural tendency of women to have higher fat deposits. Studies done in the USA reveal that 85% of women are not happy in their bodies and want to be thinner; on average, women in the USA spend 12 hours in gyms every week; in 2017 alone, 17.5 million cosmetic surgical treatments were undertaken by women. Around 20 million women in the USA alone have eating disorders; such numbers are alarming when we think of the biological abilities of women and how detrimental it is in the long run.Today the dictatorship of fashion stresses thinner athletic women, in the past it was the opposite. Plump women were symbols of beauty and were the Venuses of their times. From the Venus Figurines of the Upper Palaeolithic to marble female statuettes featuring strongly curved breasts and hips of Neolithic, fuller women were epitomes of prosperity. Curves were accentuated in the Cycladic culture, and a violin shape was conceived as the female form of beauty. From the Mauryan standards to the curvaceous apsaras of the temples, Beauty has, and has; always been defined as being healthy and fertile. So Reveal in those curves on this women’s day.