The Cost of Beauty

Renee Engeln will never forget the day early in her teaching career when a promising female student at her Ohio university said she couldn’t attend class because she was having “an ugly day.” It was a jarring statement, a stinging self-analysis that stuck with Engeln.

“I’ve never really stopped thinking about that student’s comment and the ways in which beauty pressures make it harder for so many young women to be present in the world in the way they really want to be,” says Engeln, professor of instruction in the Department of Psychology at Northwestern University’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences.

Looking around her classroom, Engeln saw other bright female students submerged by cultural expectations about how their bodies should look. Engeln’s observation ignited a decades-long exploration of young women and body image.

“Not an easy problem and no easy solutions, unfortunately,” she says.

 Decoding a complex problem

After years of research, publications, and presentations examining societal and cultural forces making it difficult for young women to have a healthy relationship with their bodies, Engeln penned Beauty Sick: How the Cultural Obsession with Appearance Hurts Girls and Women in 2017. In addition to featuring in-depth interviews with women from different ages and backgrounds on how body image issues impacted their lives, Engeln’s tome transformed years of scientific study into a digestible 410 pages for young women, parents, and others eager to combat a troubling and intensifying cultural movement.

“I wanted to explain how features of our social environment and features of the human mind interact to make this a really difficult problem,” says Engeln, director of the Body and Media Lab at Northwestern. “You can’t just decide not to care about how you look, and you shouldn’t have to, either. We should be able to have a balance where we can recognize that human attractiveness plays a role in our lives, but it shouldn’t have to take over our lives.”

Beauty Sick resonated with the public at large. Engeln discussed her work on ABC’s Good Morning America and popular podcasts like Ologies with Alie Ward. She commanded the stage at TED Talk events and saw Beauty Sick translated into six languages, a reality underscoring the topic’s global reach.

Over recent years, Engeln has received countless messages from individuals appreciative of the work, including young women who say Beauty Sick provided a framework for understanding a complex problem.

“There’s nothing neutral about the beauty standards we have for women. They’re informed by classism, by racism, and by history in a way that’s important to understand,” she says. “And they’re also not neutral in the sense that they do real damage to women’s well-being.”

 A topic for modern times

In the years since Beauty Sick’s release, the young women’s body image concerns have intensified as the social media landscape has become dominated by video-based content and sophisticated, ultra-targeted algorithms overpowering personal choice and largely dictating the content passing before a young woman’s eyes.

“The kinds of toxic elements of our culture that push women in unhealthy directions have even more oomph behind them now than they used to,” confirms Engeln, the associate director of Northwestern’s newly established Institute for Adolescent Mental Health and Well-Being. “It used to be you could teach people to be critical of what they saw in the media, but it’s getting harder and harder to fight back when content is so precisely targeted to your own vulnerabilities in the way it is now.”

Engeln’s Northwestern-based team, which includes about a dozen motivated undergraduates, continues investigating ways to counter this shift and its impact on young women’s body image. She has also broadened her research to tackle “beauty work” at large, which she defines as the time and money women feel they have to spend on beauty.

“We’re seeing astronomical growth in that domain with young girls spending money on anti-aging products and young women starting Botox before they even have wrinkles,” she says. “We’re trying to get a handle on the everyday impact beauty ideals have on young women’s lives.”

It’s a topic worthy of thoughtful exploration as beauty pressures continue to infiltrate and touch nearly every aspect of young women’s lives, affecting their physical and mental health and challenging their ability to be fully present in their lives.

“We have to care about this because when there’s something that women are feeling pressured to spend their time and money on, even if it doesn’t necessarily align with their values, that’s a problem,” Engeln says.

An Epidemic of Beauty Sickness