Shannon Beven: Society’s unrelenting beauty standards drive women bonkers

“Look at what they’ve done to my face”, read the text from a friend who’d recently been for a haircut.

It accompanied an image of a woman on the hairdresser’s social media. My friend, but also not. Her hair was the same. Better even — shiny, voluminous and looking mighty fresh. But the rest was not quite right. Close inspection and a flurry of confused messages back and forth revealed what was wrong. She’d been edited up the wazoo. Her skin was far too smooth, cheekbones a little sharper, and there was a full face of make-up on a woman who religiously adopts a less is more approach.

The mystery of the what was solved, but the mystery of the why remained.

My friend has a perfectly fine face. Handsome by any conventional measure of attractiveness.

Her hair is fabulous, thanks in part to the hairdresser and the reason she agreed to the promotional photo in the first place.

To add insult to injury, my friend doesn’t heavily edit her photos for her own social media. Again, less is more.

It’s true that some photos benefit from a little work before being posted online. Horrifyingly unflattering shots taken of me at a birthday dinner, which should never have seen the light of day, spring to mind. But this was not one of them.

The only conclusion we could reach for why the hairdresser would think it was OK to digitally alter a perfectly acceptable photo without her permission before posting was that the unrelenting standards of beauty and perfection that women are held to must have driven her bonkers.

This is the same madness that perhaps drove Kate Middleton, one of the most scrutinised women in the world, to succumb to the lure of dodgy Photoshop while recovering from major abdominal surgery.

The pressure to be perfect seems to affect us all. Maybe we’d all be better off embracing “less is more” instead.