India’s Toxic Beauty Standards & How to Break Free

I am not sure about the rest of the world, but, in India, across households rich or poor, urban or rural, North, South, East or West, there exists a curious custom. When a relative walks through your door after months apart, they do not enquire about your basic health and well-being. In fact, the first thing that they will do, is comment on (or attack) you, your skin colour, your weight, your height and anything cutting enough to make you feel like you just got punched in the face (and that you cannot express your pain).

The guillotine of beauty standards does not discriminate by gender. Men have their neck stretched under it too, and I hold space for every identity along the spectrum. But as with so many other social burdens, women are far more likely to be beheaded by it. Not because men are exempt, but because the blade is simply sharper, heavier, and falls more frequently on women.

So, let us quickly remember what an “Ideal Indian Woman” is supposed to (should) look like, because God forbid we forget:

Fair skin, obviously (the whiter, the better).
A slim body, but with fuller breasts and hips for childbearing (because that, after all, is what women were created for. Trivial to write, but that is precisely what older women have shoved down our throats).
Not too thin, of course, because she ought to have some meat on her, duh!
Tall (but not taller than their husbands-to-be, it makes them less of a man. Probably the testosterone levels fall).
Long, straight hair — because who on earth has curly hair (and the ones with short hair are unfit to get married).
Good eyes, with absolutely no spectacles (because beautiful girls simply do not wear them).
Clear skin (acne unacceptable).
Straight teeth.
A good smile.
A good figure (already mentioned, but proportions matter).
Small, beautiful feet (otherwise the Goddess will desert your house and leave you desolate).
A chiselled nose, Greek features (possible in Indian Women).
And whatever else society invented before breakfast, all of it important, all of it non-negotiable, and none of it, apparently, up for discussion.

It is true, and increasingly evident, that the budding generation of Indian women has begun to shun these practices. But before we celebrate the resistance, we must first understand the roots. Because when we try to trace where these beauty standards actually come from, we may have to go much further back than we ever imagined.

These standards, contrary to popular belief, were not invented by one person, or even by thousands of them. They were not born in a single decade or dreamt up by a single culture. They have been passed down to us through centuries, by a multitude of races, from the corners of the world, regions, cultures, and societies, layer upon layer, generation upon generation. And now, they have condensed into such rigid dirt and grime that it has become nearly impossible to wash them off.

That is the quiet violence of inherited standards. They arrive as normal, and not something extraordinary or even worth reflecting.

There are, in the end, only two things that can happen to a person who endures sustained hurt :

The first is that they become what I call, like a wound. They are open and prone to every blow, every comment, every sidelong glance, soak it all the way in , only to reek it back out onto the next generation, infecting them, in the name of culture, love, and tradition. This is not malice. It is the only language they were ever taught.

The second is that they become a scar. Healed and hardened by the hurt, they make a quiet decision. Consciously or not, that the disease ends with them. That what was done to them will not be done to their daughters or any other woman.

This single difference in how we cope with inherited pain is what breathes life into beauty standards across generations, and what, ultimately, holds the key to dismantling them.

Imagine working so hard on yourself, your career, your health, your confidence, your personality, your voice, your presence, only to be judged by the colour of your skin, the number on a scale, or any other physical feature someone decided was lacking in you.

Do you feel the hurt?

Do you feel the pain, the disrespect, the torment, the smallness of your being, and the sheer unimpactfulness of your existence, all collapsing into a single moment, the moment that comment was made?

What do you do with it?

Do you want to hurt them back? Do you want to run, to hide, to never show your face to the world again? To erase yourself entirely? Do you accept what was said as truth, and quietly decide that you simply do not matter?

Or do you sit with it, alone, and make a choice?

Do you become the wound? Or do you become the scar?

As nature has it, there ought to be a wound so that it turns into a scar. And the transition is never overnight. It is gradual, almost invisible and unnoticeable.

You take the hurt. You take the pain. You hate yourself, loathe your existence, and begin despising your own reflection. You internalize all of it, fold it inward, store it somewhere deep, telling yourself that one day, you will give it back.

And then, one day, you see someone standing exactly where you once stood. Broken in the same way. Lost in the same silence. And something shifts. You feel pity. You feel love. You feel compassion. And you realize quietly, almost without warning that you now have the power to shield them. The power to break the cycle. And you do.

That is what separates the scars from the wounds.

Because some people absorb the pain and carry it like a rot, spreading it, leaking it into every room they enter, every person they touch. Not out of cruelty, but out of a silent, wordless revenge against a time when no one stood up for them either. They pass the wound forward. They keep the cycle breathing.

But here is what I want you to understand.

Becoming the scar does not mean you won. Becoming the wound does not mean you lost. The existence of both, is proof that we have failed. As a society. Quietly, collectively, continuously.

So the question that sits with me, and I hope it sits with you too, is this:

How do we go about it now?

Honestly, imperfectly. And perhaps that is the only honest answer.

Because no matter how loudly we speak, there will always be two sides to this room. There will be people who fight these standards and people who fiercely protect them. And maybe, in our lifetime, the most we can hope for is that society becomes a little more refined.

But let us also be honest about what we are truly up against.

There are people, beautiful by the world’s conventional measurements, who have learned, consciously or not, to weaponize that. To look down. To make others feel smaller because the world once made them feel powerful for looking a certain way. It is not entirely their fault. They too are a product of the same broken system.

And then there is the machine that keeps it all alive: social media built on illusion, filters that erase humanity, cosmetic procedures normalized into routine, an endless, breathless market that profits every single time you feel like you are not enough. It is not an accident. It is a business model. Your insecurity is their economy.

So what do I want you to walk away with?

Awareness. Sharp, quiet, unshakeable awareness.

When someone is being made to feel lesser for the way they look, notice it. When a room goes quiet around someone who doesn’t fit the mold, notice it. When you feel the pull to laugh along, to scroll past, to stay comfortable, notice that too.

And then, if you can, when you can, be the one who stands beside the person being made to feel invisible. That is how cycles break. One moment of courage at a time.

The fight begins before the wound does.

It begins in the home, in the classroom, in the quiet moments when a child is still soft enough to be shaped. It begins in what we teach them, and more importantly, in what we don’t.

We teach children to associate beauty with goodness. The princess is always fair, always graceful, always rewarded. The villain is dark, misshapen. We hand them this language before they even have the words to question it. And they carry it into schools, into relationships, into the mirror every morning for the rest of their lives.

What we must teach them instead, what we owe them, is this:

That every human being, every living creature, deserves the same love, the same compassion, the same gentleness and humility that you wish for yourself. That you do not have the right to diminish another person to feel taller. That the distinctions we draw, beautiful or ugly, rich or poor, dark or fair, must be just. Must be examined. Must be questioned.

For girls. For boys. For all of them.

Because a child who is taught to see humanity in everyone they meet will not grow into an adult who needs someone else’s smallness to feel whole.

And that single shift in how we raise them might be the most radical thing we ever do.

But what about those of us who are already here?

Already shaped. Already scarred. Already wounded. Already carrying the weight of every comment that was never taken back.

The answer is not to wait for the next generation to save us. It is to begin the unlearning ourselves, and that is perhaps the hardest thing a person can do. To look at a belief you have held your whole life and say: this was given to me. I did not choose it. And I do not have to keep it.

It begins with the way you speak to yourself in private. The voice in your head that sounds like a relative, a classmate, an advertisement. Challenge it. Deny it.

It begins with the way you speak about others. The offhand comment. The comparison. The compliment that is really a quiet cruelty. Swallow it. Replace it.

You do not need to dismantle the entire system today. But you can refuse to be its instrument. You can choose, in your small corner of the world, to make people feel seen rather than measured.

That is not a small thing. That is everything we need to eventually break free of the cycle.