We live in a culture that constantly tells us who is beautiful. Turn on the television, open a magazine, scroll through social media, watch a film, or walk through a department store, and certain faces appear again and again. They become familiar. Their names become recognizable. Their features become associated with glamour, success, desirability, and status. Eventually, repeated visibility can create the illusion that these individuals were simply destined to be considered beautiful. But who made that decision?

Celebrity culture plays a powerful role in defining beauty because celebrities are not merely famous people; they are images that society repeatedly consumes. Their faces are photographed, edited, advertised, discussed, ranked, praised, criticized, and reproduced until they become cultural symbols. The public is often encouraged to believe that celebrity beauty is naturally superior, when in reality an enormous entertainment and media infrastructure determines whose face receives the spotlight.

There are millions of beautiful people who will never become celebrities. There are women with extraordinary features who will never appear on a magazine cover, men with striking faces who will never be cast as romantic leads, and people whose beauty will never be transformed into a profitable personal brand. Their absence from the spotlight does not mean they are less beautiful. It means they were not given the same visibility.

This distinction matters.

Visibility is not the same thing as beauty.

The person society sees most often can begin to feel like the person society values most. When particular celebrities repeatedly receive magazine covers, luxury campaigns, movie roles, endorsements, red-carpet attention, and social-media engagement, their appearance becomes attached to cultural ideas about what is desirable. The audience does not simply consume the celebrity; the audience learns from the celebrity.

This is where the beauty myth becomes complicated.

Beauty standards do not exist independently of history, economics, race, gender, class, and media power. American beauty culture has historically been influenced by Eurocentric ideals, including preferences surrounding skin tone, facial features, hair texture, body proportions, and other physical characteristics. Black people have therefore had to navigate a complicated cultural landscape in which Black beauty has often been celebrated selectively rather than universally.

Even within Black celebrity culture, not every form of Black beauty receives equal recognition.

The darker-skinned woman may be celebrated in one environment while overlooked in another. The woman with natural hair may be praised as empowering while still being considered less commercially conventional. The fuller-bodied woman may become celebrated as an icon while simultaneously facing expectations to conform to particular proportions. The older woman may be admired for aging “gracefully” while popular culture continues to privilege youth. These contradictions reveal something important: society’s definition of beauty is not fixed. It is negotiated.

And whoever controls the cultural spotlight has tremendous influence over that negotiation.

This does not mean that celebrities are not genuinely beautiful. Many are. The point is something deeper: celebrity status can amplify beauty, but beauty does not automatically create celebrity status.

There is a difference.

A beautiful person can remain invisible. A celebrity can become beautiful in the public imagination partly because society has been repeatedly instructed to look at that person.

This is why the question should not simply be, “Who is the most beautiful celebrity?”

We should ask:

Who gets chosen?

Who gets photographed?

Who gets discovered?

Who gets the starring role?

Who becomes the face of the beauty campaign?

Who is considered sophisticated, elegant, sexy, youthful, masculine, feminine, exotic, or desirable?

Who gets called “the most beautiful woman in the world”?

And perhaps most importantly:

Who possesses beauty but never receives the opportunity to have that beauty recognized?

The beauty myth becomes especially powerful when we confuse cultural recognition with objective truth. A person does not become objectively more beautiful because millions of people have seen their photograph. A face does not become inherently superior because an algorithm promotes it. A body does not become more valuable because a fashion company places it on a billboard.

Yet repetition has psychological power.

When society repeatedly presents certain images as aspirational, people can begin comparing themselves against those images. Beauty becomes a competition rather than an experience. Women may compare their faces, bodies, hair, skin, age, and features against celebrities who have access to professional makeup artists, hairstylists, photographers, lighting, wardrobe, cosmetic procedures, digital editing, personal trainers, and carefully constructed public images.

The photograph looks effortless.

The construction behind the photograph is anything but effortless.

This is not an argument against celebrity. It is an invitation to become more critical consumers of celebrity culture.

We can admire beautiful celebrities without believing that they represent the complete definition of beauty. We can appreciate glamour without allowing glamour to become a measurement of human worth. We can recognize extraordinary physical beauty without teaching ourselves that everyone else is ordinary.

Perhaps the most revolutionary question in The Beauty Myth Series is therefore not “Who is beautiful?”

It is:

Who gets to be beautiful in the eyes of society—and who gets left out of the picture?

Because sometimes the greatest beauty myth is not that beauty exists.

It is that only certain people deserve to be seen as beautiful.

Who gets to be called beautiful? At first glance, the question appears simple, perhaps even superficial. Beauty is often treated as an individual preference—something located in the eye of the beholder. Yet throughout history, societies have repeatedly established standards that determine which bodies, faces, skin tones, hair textures, ages, and physical characteristics receive admiration and which are marginalized. Beauty is therefore not merely an aesthetic experience; it is also a social language through which societies communicate value. Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth famously argued that modern beauty standards can function as a form of social control, particularly over women, by creating an ever-moving ideal that is difficult to attain (Wolf, 1991).

The question becomes even more complicated when race is introduced. Western beauty standards have historically privileged characteristics associated with European populations, including lighter skin, narrower facial structures, straight hair, and particular body proportions. This does not mean that European features are inherently more beautiful; rather, it demonstrates how political, colonial, and cultural power can influence which characteristics become socially dominant. Beauty standards do not develop in a vacuum. They are shaped by institutions, media, commerce, historical relationships, and systems of power.

For Black women, the politics of beauty have often involved a particularly complicated negotiation between African heritage and Eurocentric standards. During slavery and segregation, Black women were subjected to racial stereotypes that simultaneously hypersexualized, dehumanized, and denied their femininity. The historical construction of Black womanhood demonstrates that beauty has never been separate from racial politics. The ability to define someone as beautiful can become an assertion of humanity, dignity, and social belonging.

Skin color provides one of the clearest examples. Colorism—the preferential treatment of people with lighter skin within a racial or ethnic group—has been documented across numerous societies and has historical relationships with colonialism, class structures, and racial hierarchies (Hunter, 2005). Within Black communities, colorism can influence perceptions of attractiveness, employment, relationships, and social status. The darker-skinned Black woman may therefore encounter a contradictory cultural reality: she can be celebrated for her beauty while simultaneously confronting a society that has historically ranked lighter skin closer to the dominant ideal.

Hair represents another battleground. Black hair has been subjected to intense cultural scrutiny because tightly curled and coily textures have historically been characterized as undesirable, unprofessional, or unruly. Hair straightening, wigs, extensions, braids, locs, afros, and natural hairstyles therefore cannot always be understood merely as matters of fashion. They can also represent negotiations involving identity, professionalism, femininity, cultural pride, and acceptance. The politics surrounding Black hair reveal how something as personal as hairstyle can become connected to broader questions of belonging and power (Banks, 2000).

Beauty is also deeply connected to gender. Women have historically been evaluated more heavily on physical appearance than men, while their social value has often been linked to youth, attractiveness, sexuality, and conformity to feminine ideals. Susan Bordo (1993) argues that cultural expectations surrounding women’s bodies can become internalized, encouraging women to discipline and monitor themselves continuously. The beauty standard therefore does not need a constant external enforcer; individuals can eventually become their own observers, critics, and disciplinarians.

Age intensifies this problem. A woman can spend decades being told that beauty is one of her greatest assets, only to discover that society begins withdrawing that approval as she ages. Wrinkles, gray hair, changing body composition, and other natural signs of aging are frequently portrayed as problems requiring correction. The cultural obsession with youth consequently creates an impossible contradiction: women are expected to age naturally while simultaneously being pressured to conceal the evidence that they are aging.

This is particularly revealing because aging is not a failure of the body. It is evidence of survival. Every wrinkle represents time lived; every gray hair represents years experienced. Yet the beauty industry has created enormous economic opportunities from convincing consumers that natural changes are defects. Anti-aging creams, cosmetic procedures, hair coloring, supplements, injectables, surgeries, and countless other products transform insecurity into a marketplace. Beauty becomes profitable precisely when people become dissatisfied with themselves.

Class also determines who can participate in dominant beauty culture. The contemporary beauty ideal can require substantial financial resources. Professional hairstyling, skincare products, manicures, designer clothing, cosmetic procedures, personal trainers, specialized diets, and cosmetic dentistry can be expensive. Consequently, what society calls “effortless beauty” may actually require considerable economic investment. Beauty can therefore function as a form of cultural capital, where appearance communicates resources, social position, and access (Bourdieu, 1984).

Social media has intensified this phenomenon. Platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, and other visual environments allow beauty standards to circulate at extraordinary speed. Filters, artificial intelligence, editing applications, cosmetic procedures, professional lighting, and carefully curated photography can create appearances that are difficult or impossible to reproduce naturally. Yet viewers may compare their unedited bodies with other people’s highly edited images, producing dissatisfaction and unrealistic expectations. Research has associated appearance-focused social media use with body-image concerns and self-objectification among young women (Fardouly & Vartanian, 2016).

The rise of artificial intelligence introduces another dimension. Algorithms can reproduce cultural assumptions about attractiveness because the systems are trained on existing datasets containing human images and cultural patterns. If the dominant visual material disproportionately represents certain facial structures, skin tones, body types, or beauty conventions, technology may unintentionally reinforce those preferences. Artificial intelligence therefore does not necessarily create beauty standards from nothing; it can reproduce standards that society has already encoded into its cultural data.

Yet beauty standards are not universal. Anthropological research demonstrates significant variation in what different cultures have considered attractive throughout history. Preferences surrounding body size, ornamentation, hairstyles, skin decoration, facial modification, and other characteristics differ across societies. This variation challenges the assumption that there is one objectively correct human appearance. What one culture calls beautiful may be ordinary, unusual, or even undesirable somewhere else.

This does not mean that every dimension of attractiveness is completely arbitrary. Researchers have identified certain tendencies involving facial symmetry, averageness, sexual dimorphism, and other characteristics that can influence perceptions of attractiveness across populations (Rhodes, 2006). Nevertheless, biological influences do not eliminate culture. Human beings interpret physical characteristics through cultural frameworks. Biology may contribute to perception, but culture helps determine what those perceptions mean.

The entertainment industry has played an enormous role in defining who receives the visual designation of beauty. For decades, Hollywood, advertising, fashion magazines, and television frequently centered relatively narrow representations of femininity. Black actresses and models who achieved mainstream visibility often had to navigate standards that did not fully reflect the diversity of Black women’s appearances. The increasing visibility of darker-skinned women, natural hair, diverse body types, and African features represents meaningful progress, but representation alone does not automatically eliminate hierarchy.

There is also a danger in replacing one hierarchy with another. The goal of expanding beauty should not be to create a new requirement that every Black woman must possess a particular complexion, facial structure, body type, or aesthetic style to be considered beautiful. A dark-skinned woman should not have to be exceptionally tall, extraordinarily symmetrical, thin, curvy, youthful, or conventionally glamorous to earn recognition. True liberation from restrictive beauty standards requires expanding the definition of beauty rather than simply changing who occupies the top position.

This is why the phrase “the most beautiful woman in the world” deserves examination. Who created the competition? Who selected the judges? What photographs were considered? Which cultures were represented? Which features were rewarded? And perhaps most importantly, who was never invited into the conversation? The title can sound flattering while simultaneously revealing the hierarchical structure underlying beauty culture. Once beauty becomes a competition, somebody must inevitably be placed above somebody else.

Women also deserve recognition for qualities that cannot be photographed. Intelligence, compassion, courage, creativity, integrity, humor, resilience, wisdom, leadership, and spiritual depth cannot always be captured by a camera. A society that evaluates women primarily through appearance risks reducing multidimensional human beings to visual objects. bell hooks (1992) emphasized the importance of examining the politics of representation and the ways dominant visual culture can shape how Black people are seen and understood.

This does not require women to reject beauty. There is nothing inherently wrong with makeup, fashion, hairstyling, skincare, cosmetic procedures, or enjoying one’s appearance. The problem emerges when appearance becomes a prerequisite for dignity. A woman should be free to adorn herself without believing that she is worthless without adornment. Beauty should be an expression rather than a sentence; an option rather than an obligation.

Ultimately, the question “Who gets to be beautiful?” may have a more profound answer than identifying another woman to place on a pedestal. Everyone deserves the possibility of being seen as beautiful without having to conform to a single hierarchy. The dark-skinned woman, the aging woman, the woman with natural hair, the woman with scars, the woman with disabilities, the woman who does not possess conventional features, and the woman who chooses not to participate in beauty culture all remain fully human and worthy of dignity. Beauty becomes more meaningful when it ceases to function as a gatekeeper for human value.

Perhaps the most important revolution in beauty is not discovering who deserves the crown but questioning why humanity needs a crown at all. Beauty can be celebrated without becoming a ranking system. Black women can celebrate their features without measuring themselves against Eurocentric ideals or against one another. Women can grow older without apologizing for time. And society can learn to distinguish attractiveness from worth. The future of beauty should not be about finding the most beautiful woman in the world; it should be about creating a world in which no woman has to prove that she is beautiful before she is treated as valuable.

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References

Banks, I. (2000). Hair matters: Beauty, power, and Black women’s consciousness. New York University Press.

Bordo, S. (1993). Unbearable weight: Feminism, Western culture, and the body. University of California Press.

Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste. Harvard University Press.

Fardouly, J., & Vartanian, L. R. (2016). Social media and body image concerns: Current research and future directions. Current Opinion in Psychology, 9, 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2015.09.005

hooks, b. (1992). Black looks: Race and representation. South End Press.

Hunter, M. (2005). Race, gender, and the politics of skin tone. Routledge.

Rhodes, G. (2006). The evolutionary psychology of facial beauty. Annual Review of Psychology, 57, 199–226. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.psych.57.102904.190208

Wolf, N. (1991). The beauty myth: How images of beauty are used against women. William Morrow.