What is “beautiful” to you?
What you’d answer now is likely very different from what someone would have answered a few hundred years ago.
That’s because our ideas about what is beautiful shift over time.
In the past, trends tended to change very slowly. Some of the biggest beauty trends throughout history lasted hundreds of years. For example, how upper-class Japanese women practiced ohaguro, or teeth blackening, from 794 until the mid-1800s.
Even dangerous trends lasted centuries, like the obsession with very pale skin that caused rich Victorian women to ingest arsenic wafers and dust their skin with arsenic powders.
In contrast, our modern beauty trends last far less long. In fact, the standard of beauty most of us are familiar with—young, thin and smooth-skinned—is only about 60 years old.
Recently, this narrow beauty ideal has begun to shift again.