Game Theory Tells Us How Unrealistic Beauty Standards Hurt Women
Makeup can beautiful when used as a medium for art. It’s sometimes a form of expression with vibrant colors and unique patterns drawn on the skin. However, the makeup industry has also done much harm because of the unrealistic beauty standards it creates. This is because women feel pressured to wear makeup because there’s a societal standard for woman to be pretty and have certain features. Makeup changes the aesthetic of faces so that the standard for beauty is now higher and more specific. So then an obvious question hits, why do women wear makeup regularly if it does so much harm? The article linked below describes this exact topic and the answer lies in game theory.
Having no one wear makeup is the optimal outcome because there is no longer an unrealistic societal standard. However, game theory tells us that the ideal outcome is not necessarily “optimal”. This is a concept from finding the Nash Equilibrium which is the solution of a non-cooperative game with players. We define the players here as women. Let’s say the first set of women decide to stop wearing makeup to break the social norm. Now another set of women will find it advantageous to wear makeup to enhance their beauty, and now the first set of women are in a disadvantaged position because they are perceived as less beautiful. Consider the payoff matrix shown below.
Payoff Matrix from the article:
The ideal choice in the payoff matrix is (0,0) where no one wears makeup. But this is not the likely outcome. There is an incentive for one set of woman to wear makeup when the other set is not to be perceived as more beautiful (2,0). Therefore, based off rational choice, the optimal outcome is for everyone to wear makeup.
Why does any of this matter? It’s because artificially increasing one’s beauty has lead to a standard that damages everyone because woman are guided to believe that their worth depends heavily on their beauty. They grow up believing that they need to hide their imperfections and look a certain way in order to be beautiful and fit a western beauty standard.
So while makeup can be a good thing for expression, the industry has many downfalls where the action of woman affect each other.
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Let Game Theory Tell You How Unrealistic Beauty Standards Hurt Women