19 Celebs Who Called BS On Hollywood's Ridiculous Beauty Standards
Warning: This post deals with body image.
In 2022, Allure asked Kim Kardashian if she felt "responsible, even guilty, for setting an unrealistic, unattainable beauty standard." She replied, "If I'm doing it, it's attainable."
She continued, "There are so many different beauty standards — whether it’s Gwen Stefani, Jennifer Lopez, Marilyn Monroe. When I was a teenager, [the look] was just blonde waifs... My mentality was never like, you see them on TV or in magazines and pick who you want to be. It was always: Be yourself, find beauty in everything."
Celebrities like the Kardashian-Jenners have been criticized for promoting "unattainable" beauty standards without acknowledging the privilege that comes with being able to afford personal trainers, nutritionists, beauty treatments, etc. that help them achieve their look. However, others have called out the unrealistic expectations that Hollywood sets for people's bodies.
Here are 19 times celebs called out the "unattainable beauty standards” in Hollywood:
1.In 2023, Jenna Ortega told Harper's Bazaar, "As a child actor, there are two jobs that you can get: You're either the younger version of someone, or you're playing somebody's daughter – and there were just not many leading Hispanic actors who I could be that for. So a lot of the jobs that I was going for growing up would never work out, because I didn't look [a certain] way. That was really hard, to hear that something you couldn't change was what was preventing you [from succeeding]."
"I wanted to dye my hair blonde so that I would look like Cinderella," she said.
However, she eventually realized it was better to remain authentic. She continued, "I thought, 'I don’t want other young girls to look up at the screen and feel like they have to change their appearance to be deemed beautiful or worthy.'"
2.In a viral interview clip from 2023, Bella Ramsey said, "I was told [in] one of my first auditions ever... The director really liked me, but I didn't get the part because I didn't have the 'Hollywood look.'"
"That's something that I've always found very interesting," they added.
3.In 2022, Zac Efron told Men's Health, "That Baywatch look, I don't know if that's really attainable. There's just too little water in the skin. Like, it's fake; it looks CGI'd."
He continued, "And that required Lasix, powerful diuretics, to achieve. So I don’t need to do that. I much prefer to have an extra, you know, 2 to 3 percent body fat... I started to develop insomnia, and I fell into a pretty bad depression, for a long time. Something about that experience burned me out. I had a really hard time recentering. Ultimately, they chalked it up to taking way too many diuretics for way too long, and it messed something up."
4.In 2023, Florence Pugh told Vogue, "Body image for women is a major thing. From the moment you start growing thighs and bums and boobs and all of it, everything starts changing. And your relationship with food starts changing. I had a weird chapter at the beginning of my career, but that was because I wasn't complying. I think that was confusing to people, especially in Hollywood."
She continued, "Women in Hollywood, especially young women in Hollywood, are obviously putting themselves in all these ways in order to get whatever opportunity that they need to get because that's just the way that it's been. I think I definitely put my foot down in that aspect. I love food."
5.During the 2017 Beautycon Festival, Zendaya said, "As a Black woman, as a light-skinned Black woman, it's important that I'm using my privilege, my platform to show you how much beauty there is in the African American community. I am Hollywood's, I guess you could say, acceptable version of a Black girl, and that needs to change."
She continued, "We're vastly too beautiful and too interesting for me to be the only representation of that. What I'm saying, it's about creating those opportunities. Sometimes you have to create those paths. And that's with anything, Hollywood, art, whatever."
6.In 2021, Olivia Rodrigo told the Guardian, "It's hard for anyone to grow up in this media where it feels like if you don't have European features and blond hair and blue eyes, you're not traditionally pretty. I felt that a lot — since I don't look exactly like the girl next door in all these movies, I'm not attractive."
"That actually took me a while to shake off. It's something I’m still shaking off now," she said.
7.In 2015, Gina Rodriguez told Glamour, "After a photo shoot, if I get photoshopped to make me 'look better' and it doesn't look like me, I remind myself, those are their standards, definitely not mine."
She also said, "I am not superhuman. I constantly work on not letting those images push away the reminder that I am beautiful the way I am."
8.In a 2018 op-ed for the New York Times, Amber Tamblyn wrote, "For most actresses on red carpets, what you're wearing is less an expression of who you are and more an expression of what you’re worth. The very act of getting ready for an award show can be a masochist's checklist of one's value... Prepping for award shows can be a weeklong marathon in dread, resulting in a one-time portrayal of improbable beauty. You're also often assigned a look that doesn't reflect who you truly are but reflects what a runway wants you to be."
She continued, "We actresses are not just modeling clothing when we walk a red carpet on award show night. We are modeling a kind of behavior. We are speaking in a coded language to other women — even young girls — that says: The way I look and what I wear and how I wear it is the standard for women. What is being worn is not an exception. It is the rule. You must dress a certain way and look a certain way if you want to be valued as a woman, no matter what you do for a living or who you are. We never intend for this to be the message we are sending with what we wear, but often it is the perceived one, whether we like it or not. I have often wondered what would happen if actresses stood in solidarity with a singular, powerful choice for just one night...to uniformly reject our lifelong objectification and say: Enough. We belong to no one. We are a canvas for no expression other than the words our voices have chosen to speak."
9.In a since-deleted tweet in 2020, a fan asked Lili Reinhart if she thought "TV shows like [Riverdale] aimed at teenagers are contributing to unrealistic body expectations [and] body image issues." Lili replied, "Actually, not everyone on this show is perfectly chiseled. And even I feel intimidated by the physique of my surrounding cast mates sometimes when I have to do bra/underwear scenes. I’ve felt very insecure due to the expectation that people have for women on TV, what they should look like."
She continued, "But I have come to terms with my body and that I'm not the kind of person you would see walking on a runway during fashion week. I have bigger boobs, I have cellulite on my thighs/butt, and my stomach sticks out rather than curves in. This is still something I struggle with on a daily basis. And it doesn't help when I'm being compared to other women. I have gained weight due to depression the last two months, and I've felt very insecure about it. But I did a recent bra and underwear scene and felt it was my...obligation to be strong and show confidence in myself, looking as I do. And I want other young women to see my body on TV and feel comfort in the fact that I'm not a size 0. And I'm not a perfect hourglass shape. This industry struggles with accurate representation of female and male bodies. So I commend the women who have helped our industry take a step in the right ~and authentic~ direction. (Charli Howard being my favorite role model)."
10.In 2023, America Ferrera told Elle, "What's so insane is, you go back and look [at my early roles], and I had a very average-size body. And so the idea that people were looking at me and saying, 'That's curvy' is crazy. Not that I care, but it's like, that's insane that we thought that was so groundbreaking."
She continued, "I was Hollywood’s version of imperfect, which seems so ridiculous... I don't feel alone in that either. There are so many women who were called brave, just because they are people in bodies."
11.In 2017, Paris Jackson told i-D Magazine, "I'm not symmetrical, I'm not a size zero, I eat hella burgers and endless amounts of pizza. I can't fit into a runway sample size of designer clothes, I have scars and stretch marks and acne, and I have cellulite. I'm human. Not a dress-up doll. The idea that we all have to fit one idea of beauty is outrageous and ridiculous because 'perfection' is just an opinion."
She also said, "The rest of the world, the racists, the homophobes, the sexists, they're getting outnumbered by people with open minds. So this world has no choice but to embrace everyone else's beauty. Not just one idea of beauty. It's such a broad thing, 'beauty.' You can't put into just one template."
12.In 2023, Sara Bareilles told Glamour, "In these last handful of years, I've done a lot of work on trying to understand where some of my patterns have come from, and I could feel myself, as I'm going back into a press cycle and being in front of people and dressing up and taking pictures and being on TV, and I could feel my anxiety spiking... For the first time, I think honestly, with the help of both meditation and medication, there's more spaciousness in my brain to see…the gears turning. And some of it is just rage at what women — and I don't want to be exclusive, it's not just women, it's certainly people across the spectrum of gender — but it feels like we have been taught to try and hide that we're aging from everybody."
She continued, "It's a very cruel place to be inside yourself, because it is an essential truth of how life works, and we're almost being asked to deny it. So the stress of trying to conceal this completely natural evolution and this natural stage is just fucked up."
13.In 2018, Priyanka Chopra Jonas told Allure, "It's a necessary evil to look the best that you can [in the entertainment world]. But I'm also the kind of girl who likes to be turned out. I like to get dressed up."
She also said, "You see so many women, different sizes, modeling, acting, taking their strength, but it's the mindset that needs to change, of society, of men, of people — that view where a woman in a plus size should not be a check in the box. Or a woman of color should not be a check in the box. Or a woman shouldn't be a check in the box... Beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder. And everyone doesn't look the same way, so the world needs to be trained to see beauty differently."
14.In 2023, Charlize Theron told Allure, "I've always had issues with the fact that men kind of age like fine wines and women like cut flowers. I despise that concept, and I want to fight against it, but I also think women want to age in a way that feels right to them. I think we need to be a little bit more empathetic to how we all go through our journey. My journey of having to see my face on a billboard is quite funny now."
She also said, "My face is changing, and I love that my face is changing and aging. [But] people think I had a facelift. They're like, 'What did she do to her face?' I'm like, 'Bitch, I'm just aging! It doesn't mean I got bad plastic surgery. This is just what happens.'"
15.In 2019, discussing his desire to tell stories that appeal to a wide range of people, John Boyega told Hypebeast, "It's not only race to me. It's aesthetic of people. Why do leads always have to be muscular and ripped?"
He continued, "That kind of sometimes shows to me that the guy has too much time on his hands. What real war hero of history [looks that way?] Do you know what I mean? It's about rebranding the way in which we are fed a false narrative of perfection."
16.In 2014, Gisele Bündchen told the Sunday Times magazine, "Sometimes I feel like adverts like this [my Chanel No. 5 campaign] can make women feel so distant. They are so glamorous and so unattainable and so aspirational that you really can’t touch them, in a way. They are kind of a dream."
However, she felt her ad — in which she played a surfer, mother, and model — was more "relatable," though still luxurious.
She said, "Of course she's glamorous — she is powerful and successful — but she is also struggling. She's a mother, a wife, and a professional. She's juggling all of that, and, you know, that's not easy."
17.In 2021, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson told Vanity Fair, "A few years into my Hollywood career, approximately the mid-2000s, I was told then that I had to lose weight. I had to change my eating habits, diet, couldn't go to the gym as much. I really had to slim down. At that time, when there was no blueprint for somebody who looked like me, talk, walk like me...half Black, half Samoan. I look how I look, I talk how I talk... Well, you buy into that shit, as I did, until one of two things is gonna happen."
He continued, "You're either gonna continue to go down that road, and that path, and you're gonna be miserable, and eventually your career is probably gonna fizzle out, and you're not gonna have any sense of longevity or quality to it. Or, the other thing that's gonna happen, you're gonna say, 'Fuck this shit. I'm gonna be me, and we're gonna see what happens.' And I think in that authenticity moment...a funny thing happened in the world of professional wrestling, and a funny thing happened in the world of Hollywood. Both industries conformed to my authenticity and allowed me to be me."
18.In 2019, Yara Shahidi told Allure, "I've been in this industry from a young age, and a side effect of that is getting used to seeing yourself in makeup early on. People say, 'Oh, you're going to be on camera, so here's some concealer, here's some of this.' When I was 14, Mommy had to take me through an undoing process of what had been built up in my head. Like being in the makeup trailer, and makeup artists would put my lashes on and say, 'There you are,' like I wasn't there before."
"I had been on HD cameras for so long, I felt I needed [makeup] to be pretty for the world. On my days off, I was still like, 'Where's my concealer, where's my blender?' It didn't feel enjoyable. It took a year-plus for me to learn to feel comfortable in my skin. Now when I want to use makeup, it's because I feel like doing it, not because I feel like it's a necessity. Growing out my unibrow was also a turning point for me," she said.
19.And finally, in 2021, Sarah Snook told Vogue Australia, "Every time you get a role, you're like: 'Oh, this one's the one. I'm going to really work out and get fit and look like the movie star I would hope to become or have a career doing.'"
She continued, "And every time, I'm like: 'Can I really be fucked subscribing to an unrealistic beauty standard that then perpetuates and makes more women unhappy because they feel like they can't attain something that's not actually realistic anyway?'"
The National Eating Disorders Association helpline is 1-800-931-2237; for 24/7 crisis support, text “NEDA” to 741741.
