Five The Weirdest Women Beauty Standards in History

Nowadays it is almost impossible to meet the standards set by the movie industry. However, you should not feel bad about that. The truth is, not even the celebrities who set those standards look like that without a ton of makeup and some skillful retouching of the photographs. Nonetheless, these beauty standards are downright bizarre, and we should all be thankful that they are gone.

While most of this are only weird or disgusting, some of the entries on this list caused literal deformities and were really not good for both mental and physical health of the women who tried to conform to them. Check the list out, but be careful with google image searches as some of this might be pretty disturbing.

 Malformed skulls

Around three thousand years ago, the ancient Mayas actually started reshaping the skulls of their babies in order to get a flattened look. As you can probably assume, it was not a pleasant process. The infant whose head was to be malformed was usually bound to a board with another board being forcefully pushed against its head and it was held like that until the skull was permanently reshaped. It is currently believed that it held no social status, but it was simply done out of trying to make the child more aesthetically pleasing.

 Painted legs

The number of people who can remember the nylon craze of the 1930s is small, but this was something else. By some accounts, the daily sales of nylon stockings topped 4 million units a day! However, when Great Britain and the United States had to redirect the resources to help their armed forces, a nylon shortage seemed to be a great issue. Namely, nylon was being used to produce parachutes, ropes, cords and other military equipment instead of stockings, and the government was in a pinch because of that.

The thing is, you don’t want the people to realize how bad you are doing financially. Therefore, the message that was sent to the housewives of these two great countries was – “make do” simply to keep the morals up. Since the war lasted for years, their nylon stockings were no longer mendable. As such, they had to resort to painting them on. Those who had the skills to do so or enough money to hire someone else, would draw lines that resembled the seams of the stockings. They also used make-up to make their legs look better.  Those who could not afford it painted their legs with gravy to mimic the stockings.

 Incredibly small feet

Now, this one is very famous as it was well documented. Although we know a lot about how it is done, we still cannot trace the origins of it. What we can pinpoint is that it became very popular with women of aristocrats around the thirteenth century. And, as most fashion choices of the nobles do, it quickly spread to the masses. How they achieved it was very gruesome. They would bind the feet of a girl when she was about five years old until their bones broke. With the bones broken they would proceed to bend their toes towards their soles and keep it that way until it became permanent. It was incredibly painful and left those women permanently crippled as they would never have the full mobility back.

 Insanely long fingernails

Yet another one hailing from China, but this one was not restricted only to women. Both genders of the Qing Dynasty tried to grow their nails as long as they could. This was completely impractical, but that was the point of it. They grew their nails so long to remind everyone that they are so rich, that they simply never needed to use their hands. This also meant that they had to rely on others (their servants) to put food in their mouths or dress them up.

 No eyelashes

As we all know, long batting eyelashes are very attractive. Well, even during the Renaissance in Europe, people felt the same about them. However, the attractive appeal was out during that time, and so were the eyelashes. The problem was that the Catholic Church decided that showing any hair was a sin because it was erotic. This led to women covering up their hair and completely plucking both their eyebrows and their eyelashes.

Now that you have read it, let us all just be thankful for the fact that we just don’t have to suffer the way those people (mostly girls) did. Today, we can use Photoshop to fix our pictures before posting them on social networks without going through some of these awfully painful processes.