“Beauty h as always been political despite how innocuous appearance-based Tiktok trends might seem” The trend led to many people, especially non-white creators, decrying in their videos that they disliked their nose shape from the side. One recent trend saw users analysing their side profile, by covering their nose with an index finger to appear small and straight and then revealing what their nose really looks like. Bit by bit, these TikTok trends seem to promote a culture that seeks to decide who is acceptable and who is less acceptable. For instance, there were ‘ugly laws’ in 1800s America which discouraged visibly disabled or marginalised people from appearing in public spaces. Beauty has always been political despite how innocuous appearance-based Tiktok trends might seem. The ‘ugly-beautiful’ binary opens up simplistic, eugenicist ideas that suggest intelligence and work ethic are based on facial features, body size and being non-disabled. The passive acceptance of ‘body checking’ trends I see on TikTok are just one example of this dysfunctional culture, reinforcing damaging, exclusionary hierarchies of beauty. In the late 1700s, he wrote that white Europeans were “richer in intelligence” and more beautiful than other ethnic groups.Ĭonsidering this history, the enduring elevation and prominence of Eurocentric beauty ideals show society as a whole has clearly not dismantled the white supremacist ideas that render certain bodies more valuable than others. Meiners coined the term ‘Caucasian’ as an ethnic category and created a binary model that denigrated non-white people while elevating those he considered white. One such example of this in action comes from the rhetoric of Christoph Meiners, who was a white supremacist anthropologist who believed different races had different origins. Specifically, eugenics aimed to use science to separate human attributes into ‘desirable’ and ‘undesirable’, and worked to pathologise traits viewed by European cultures as inferior, creating an aesthetic hierarchy. To me, these beauty standards presented on TikTok feel like eugenics repackaged for a younger audience.Ī specific form of scientific racism and ableism, eugenics is part of a long history of pseudoscience that categorised humans on a sliding scale based on harmful binaries like ‘civilised’ and ‘uncivilised’.

Beyond the light-hearted dance videos to Doja Cat songs, many trends show users analysing and dissecting their appearances, nudging them to internalise longstanding ideas of desirability. TikTok is best known for its vast universe of endless dance challenges, skits and viral sounds.

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