The perfect body shape, country by country
What counts as the ideal female body shape is a hotly debated question around the world, and the answer changes from one country to the next.
An international experiment, “Perceptions of Perfection”, showed that it is all a matter of perception.
Its results show that bodies differ from one country to another, and not always in the way you would have guessed for a given country. That, at least, is what came out of the work of eighteen graphic designers, all of them women, who retouched the same photograph to make its subject appealing to their own compatriots. They were chosen so that the study could gather their view of the female body as seen from their country, and because they are the first to live with the pressures placed on them where beauty is concerned.
Where the Spanish and Colombian versions give us a woman with fuller curves, China and Italy went for strikingly slender bodies. The American designers favoured a slim shape while keeping distinctly feminine curves, and in the United Kingdom the silhouette becomes longer and leaner. In the Philippines, the waist was reduced to put the emphasis on the hips and the bust. In Egypt, the hips are prized too…
The experiment sets out to show that standards of beauty are unrealistic, and how that pressure is applied to varying degrees in different parts of the world.