Beauty standards are so all-pervasive—in movies, TV, magazines, and advertising—that we take them as given. And lots of us go through the world assuming that “beautiful” means what our culture says it does: smooth, symmetrical, clean, thin, delicate and young.

But did you know that throughout history—and in cultures all over the world—“beautiful” has meant radically different things?

Our culture’s current beauty standard is really only about 60 or 70 years old.

When you realize that the word “beautiful” has meant hundreds of different things throughout the course of history, it becomes a whole lot easier to see those standards not as some all-powerful truth, but as just one more idea of what beauty can be.

And when we realize that “beauty” is a subjective thing—that there are lots and lots of ways to define it—it makes room for us to see beauty in diversity; to realize there are just as many ways to be beautiful as there are women in the world.

Women would then cover up these sores by applying more white lead on top.

As you can imagine, this standard of beauty was pretty rough on people’s health—life expectancies for women were a lot lower, and poisonous makeup was one reason why.

The Ancient Greeks loved unibrows.

Ancient Greek civilization was one of the first to try to quantify beauty, with various philosophers and mathematicians (such as Pythagoras) searching for the ultimate mathematical formula for beauty.

A lot of ideas came out of this search, including the “Golden Ratio” and the concept that a beautiful face is composed of perfectly symmetrical thirds. But the Greeks also loved the unibrow! (Maybe because of its symmetry?)

So for contrast, the most beautiful women painted their teeth black!

Throughout most of history, curvy has been considered the “ideal.”

In societies all over the world, beauty standards have often been connected with class and wealth.

Until a couple hundred years ago (or less!) most people performed physical labor and ate only what they needed to survive—so they were pretty thin and muscular.

In these societies, curviness was rare, and the heavier a woman was, the more beautiful she was considered. A full figure was evidence of fertility—but more importantly, it was evidence of wealth.

Even in the U.S. in the 50s, the “ideal” female body type was much heavier than it is today. A thin silhouette as the beauty standard is a very recent development—it only started in the 1960s!

These are just a few examples of the wildly varying beauty standards women have negotiated throughout history.

When I find myself measuring how well I fit our society’s beauty ideals (hey, everyone does it sometimes), I think it’s useful to remember how diverse they have been.

What that tells me is that there are hundreds (thousands!) of different ways for a woman to be beautiful, and what society calls “the rules” at any given moment are pretty arbitrary.

I feel a lot happier when I remind myself that there’s actually no single look that’s "beautiful" and that beauty can come in a thousand different forms. And actually, that happiness radiates from the inside—and creates true beauty.