Beauty Standards As Cultural Capital: A Contextual-Comparative Study of Beauty and Symbolic Boundaries in Accra, Brussels, Buenos Aires, Hong Kong and Tehran

A growing body of research shows that physical appearance or ‘aesthetic capital’ is an important resource in today’s media-saturated, service-oriented, consumer societies. However, most of this research assumes a wide consensus on beauty standards, arguing that ‘objective’ beauty brings economic and social rewards. This paper investigates if and how beauty standards function as cultural capital: variable cultural standards that mark symbolic boundaries and social status. Moreover, we investigate how this varies across contexts, hypothesizing that beauty standards are more likely to function as status-related boundary markers in more diverse contexts.

In this presentation, we first explain the construction and design of a context-specific instrument for studying beauty standards in five global cities on four continents: Accra, Brussels, Buenos Aires, Hong Kong and Tehran. In close collaboration and using a strictly defined set of criteria, we have designed five sets of visual Q-sort decks that allows us to trace variations (and similarities) in beauty standards for bodies and faces of women and men in each city. These Q-decks will form the basis of interviews, simultaneously providing quantitative mapping of standards across social categories, and qualitative analysis of repertoires of evaluating beauty.

Second, we will present the results of these studies, which will be carried out between March and November 2024. For every city we will present: the degree of consensus or variation in beauty standards; the main repertoires of evaluation of beauty; the main taste patterns, and how they are related to social divisions in each city.