This article discusses eating disorders and may be triggering for some readers. The Canadian Mental Health Association Crisis Line can be reached at 1-800-875-6213.
This article discusses sexual violence and may be triggering for some readers. The Kingston Sexual Assault Centre’s 24-hour crisis and support phone line can be reached at 613-544-6424 / 1-800-544-6424 or by emailing bjl7@queensu.ca.
Every decade or so, a new set of beauty standards emerges, instructing women to alter their bodies to get as close to the new ideal as possible. Today, the ideal body bears a close resemblance to that of the 1990s and early 2000s—a body type that has been affectionately nicknamed “heroin chic.”
According to FHE Health, “heroin chic” refers to a style movement characterized by “pale skin, a very thin frame, dark undereye circles, androgynous clothing, and limp or stringy hair.” It was a direct response to the rise of heroin use in the modeling industry, and it soon became an iconic look that populated young girls’ vision boards.
As with all trends, the heroin chic style was eventually replaced by a new set of beauty standards. Today, with the revival of Y2K fashion and the pervasiveness of weight loss drugs like Ozempic, heroin chic seems to be making a comeback.
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Jenna* has been painfully aware of weight-related beauty standards since she was a young girl. Growing up chubbier than most of her peers, she learned early on that her weight had a major influence on her social life.
“Since grade one or two, I really had no friends,” Jenna said in an interview with The Journal. “I was just the fat girl.”
Being raised without much exposure to the media, Jenna wasn’t familiar with the diet culture promoted by many public figures. However, her interactions with her peers and family taught her that thin would always be “in.”
When Jenna entered middle school, the pressure to lose weight became even harder to ignore.
“From Grade seven to 10, I was always a bigger person, and from the very start of school, that was never okay for people,” Jenna said. “[Since I] didn’t really look the best according to them, I think they found me really weird and wrong, and they treated me as such.”
In middle school, Jenna had access to social media sites like Tumblr, where she learned more about the “ideal body type” and other beauty standards. The Internet is also where she discovered different youth subcultures, such as the scene and modern hippie subcultures.
“Honestly, the hippie style has always really impacted me because usually it really involves being thin,” Jenna said. “I have always loved vintage clothes, and you never see, in any type of media, bigger people in this style.”
Jenna dreamed of being able to dress how she wanted, and more importantly, she wanted the perfect body that she had seen all over Tumblr.
This, coupled with the bullying she faced from her peers, caused Jenna to develop anorexia nervosa, an eating disorder characterized by extreme undereating and an “intense fear of being fat.”
Jenna ended up finding a “pro-ana,” or pro-anorexia, community on the Internet, which sent her further down the spiral of her own eating disorder. She joined discord servers where teenagers with eating disorders would shame each other into losing weight, sharing “fatspo,” or pictures of larger people, to scare themselves into starvation so as not to become like the people in these pictures.
Jenna also shared that older men would often join “pro-ana” communities of primarily underaged girls to “train them to be thin through bullying.” These men would prey on the vulnerability of young girls who already believed their bodies to be flawed by making them send nude or partially clothed pictures of themselves for further criticism.
These harmful tactics worsened Jenna’s anorexia and caused her to lose a substantial amount of weight, which, in turn, transformed her social life.
“I lost most of my weight in the beginning half of high school, and people definitely didn’t like me or care about me or want to talk to me before I lost weight,” Jenna said. “Honestly, after I lost weight, I gained confidence. I was making friends.”
Jenna’s family also began to treat her differently once she started losing weight. Despite being at one of the lowest points of physical and mental health in her life, Jenna was congratulated for her weight loss. Family members would remark, “oh my God, you look amazing!” and “I’m so proud of you—your mom must be so proud of you.”
This only confirmed Jenna’s belief that thinner people were more valued by society.
Jenna’s not alone in experiencing improved social treatment due to weight loss. According to Dr. Rebecca Puhl, deputy director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at the University of Connecticut, weight bias and weight stigma often leads to prejudice towards larger people.
Weight stigma reflects the “social devaluation” of larger people, often based on the assumption that larger people are “lazy, lacking in willpower or discipline, or they’re sloppy or noncompliant with medical treatment,” Dr. Puhl says.
Weight stigma and weight bias can infiltrate all aspects of a person’s life, and when internalized, often result in eating disorders, as was the case with Jenna.
“It’s a really serious problem,” Jenna said. “It’s not just like it hurts people’s feelings—it kills people.”
Eating disorders have the highest overall mortality rate of any mental illness, with 10 to 15 per cent of patients dying from suicide, cardiac disease, and other health complications.
Jenna’s body image has improved since high school, but she continues to struggle with disordered eating. She believes it’s difficult for many women to unlearn these mindsets because they are so normalized.
“I don’t think I’ve met a woman who hasn’t struggled with some kind of eating disorder, honestly, whether they’re diagnosed or not,” Jenna said. “Most women don’t want to get diagnosed because they don’t want help, or they don’t think that there’s a problem because everyone around them does it.”
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Greta Speidel, ArtSci ’26, believes beauty standards like the “heroin chic aesthetic” are largely perpetuated by social media.
“[Social media] has allowed for a broader representation of body types and increased visibility of body positivity movements,” Speidel said in a statement to The Journal. “However, these trends can still perpetuate unrealistic standards, as women often feel pressured to conform to these ideals through cosmetic procedures and other means.”
Speidel believes these trends are often driven by media representations, celebrity culture, and historical shifts in ideals.
“Such trends could also be linked to socioeconomic factors, as those with higher status often set these standards, making them somewhat aspirational for others,” Speidel added.
Filters, editing, and posing can all contribute to the pressure to conform to beauty standards. As editing technology becomes more advanced, it’s possible to make yourself appear several sizes smaller in both videos and pictures. While it might have been easy to notice edits like this in the past, AI has been used to make these edits nearly undetectable, warping your body but not the background.
“We see that filters and editing tools are driving a lot of self-concern and anxiety,” according to facial and reconstructive surgeon Dr. Patrick Byrne, MD. “When you don’t like the way you look on screen, you can just magically fix it with the swipe of your finger on the screen.”
Dr. Byrne also believes social media has distorted how people view themselves. His patients often describe liking how they look in the mirror but hating how they look in pictures, picking apart flaws in selfies that are barely noticeable in real life.
“[Patients] instinctively pull out their phone and start showing us that their nose is too big or too crooked,” Dr. Byrne claims. “That’s an incredible dynamic, to suggest that an image on your phone is more reflective of reality than the actual physical you who’s sitting in the room.”
Even without editing, selfies don’t always accurately portray how someone looks. A study on this phenomenon found selfies can make your nose appear 30 per cent bigger than it is.
“We take high-depth professional studio images of our patients — but sometimes, people see that accurate version of themselves on our screen and they get confused and can’t even point out what they think the problem is,” Dr. Byrne explains. “They’re basing their self-image on a medium that oftentimes distorts their facial features.”
Because of the many ways social media can perpetuate unrealistic beauty standards, Speidel believes it’s important for young women to learn to critically evaluate the content they consume online.
“Young women should educate themselves on media literacy to ensure that they don’t fall for these false representations,” Speidel said.
As a member of Queen’s Feminist Leadership in Politics, Speidel says these standards directly harm the feminist movement by perpetuating unrealistic expectations and a pressure to conform.
“Societal pressures remain pervasive, forcing women to navigate fluctuating ideals that affect self-esteem and autonomy,” Speidel said. “My advice to younger women would be to embrace your individuality.”
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Bee Peitsch, ArtSci ’26, has witnessed firsthand the harm the “heroin chic” trend inflicts upon young people.
“I don’t actively seek out content that some might call “thinspo” or “ed twt” [eating disorder Twitter], but it runs in my circles,” Peitsch said in a statement to The Journal. “I see [this content] every so often and it can be hard to look away, especially when the pressure of beauty standards is so high.”
As a mid-plus-sized person, Peitsch has been impacted by body type trends like “heroin chic” throughout their life.
“Some of my most vivid memories are of crying to my parents about how I just wanted to be smaller, thinner, like all the people around me,” Peitsch said. “I hated myself with a passion that no nine-year-old should hate themself, and I think that the media was the root cause of this.”
Body image issues can present in children as young as three years old. Although they may not understand why, children at this age can pick up on which bodies are “good bodies” and which bodies are “bad bodies.”
According to Dr. Jocelyn R. Lebow, a clinical psychologist at Mayo Clinic, “two- and three-year-olds already understand differences in body size and may already be picking up on the value judgments our culture places on bigger versus smaller bodies.”
The media, along with parents and peers, play an instrumental role in shaping these perceptions.
“I watched a lot of Disney as a kid, and the main characters were always skinny, with a ‘perfect’ body,” Peitsch said. “Any character who was a little bigger was a side character or a villain. I did not see my body type reflected positively on the screen or in print.”
As Peitsch got slightly older, they started to notice the magazines on display at the grocery store checkout, hypnotized by the before and after pictures of celebrities on the front page.
“I can’t remember there ever being a cover that didn’t have something to say about the weight or appearance of the person on the cover,” Peitsch said. “Whether they were claiming the person was too big or perfectly small, it was always the biggest boldest font, letting you know that how they–often she–looked was the most important.”
Today’s “heroin chic” trend has pushed even the most “body positive” women to seek out Ozempic prescriptions and restrict their calories. Peitsch believes it’s important to consider the roots of these beauty standards before blindly conforming to them.
“Our patriarchal society wants to control the bodies of women at all times,” Peitsch said. “No matter how many rights women have, no matter how many feminist movements exist, there seem to always be men who feel it is their right to dictate a woman’s body, that it exists as an object for their enjoyment and pleasure.”
Peitsch believes beauty standards inherently conflict with the values of feminism. Feminism represents the ideology that all people are equal, regardless of gender. It also involves solidarity among those who are at a disadvantage because of their gender.
“Beauty standards imply that some women are better than others because they meet a certain arbitrary standard for beauty, whether that be weight, height, skin tone, or anything, and that is anti-feminist to me,” Peitsch said.
Given the pervasiveness of beauty standards, it is difficult to shield your body image from the pressure to conform. Peitsch encourages young people struggling with this pressure to adopt a “body neutral” attitude, which involves accepting your body as it is and appreciating all the ways your body serves you.
“[Your body] keeps you breathing, keeps your heart pumping, lets you dance and jump and play, and none of that requires you to look like a model,” Peitsch said.
Adopting this attitude may not completely shield you from societal pressures, but it can be empowering in an age of beauty standards that centre the male gaze.
“Wasting time counting calories, holding back on the foods we love, and refusing to live because we do not feel pretty enough to be a part of society is exactly what oppressive systems such as the patriarchy want,” Peitsch said. “The same patriarchy that did not let women vote for so long wants women to be silent and complicit in their oppression through their own bodies. I think that is ridiculous.”
*Name changed for safety reasons
Tags
body image, Eating Disorders, Fashion, feminism, trends
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AZimex
This is pure wisdom
AzImex
Thanks for being authentic