Beauty editor investigates cultural link between weight and beauty

Dec 17, 2014

Associate Fashion and Beauty editor of Bustle magazine, Marie Southard Ospina, is the latest person to challenge global perceptions of beauty.

This year, we’ve seen women send their images to photoshopping experts across the globe and requested the photos be altered so that the result fits in with that particular culture’s understanding of ‘beautiful’.

Well, Marie has gone one step further and investigated the cultural link between beauty and weight which allows us to see how many experts altered Marie's size in a bid to make her ‘beautiful’.

Having been judged on her size, Marie says "Stereotypes include, but are not limited to: laziness, selfishness, stupidity, naiveté and even a lower socioeconomic class."

Here are just some of the results of Marie's experiment.

Ukraine

Mexico

Latvia

Despite some obvious alterations having been made to Marie's size in some of these images, she says: "I'm aware that the notion of "thin is the only beautiful" doesn't permeate the entirety of the world."

Evidence of which can be seen in Italy's and Australia's re-touching which doesn't appear to focus on Marie's size as much as other country's did.

Italy