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The purpose of this study was to investigate Latina, Black, and White women's conceptions of beauty and perceptions of cultural standards of beauty, as well as whether or not the participants were engaging in similar social comparison processes, specifically, the denial of personal disadvantage. One hundred and fifty-seven college women participated: 48 Latinas, 52 Black women, 51 White women, and 6 "Others." Results indicate that there are significant differences in Latinas', Black women's, and White women's relationships with their bodies, and their relationships to dominant cultural standards of beauty. In addition, there were differences by race in the tendency to engage in the denial of personal disadvantage response. These findings contribute to the understanding of how racial identity affects, or interacts with, the experience of beauty standards among Latina, Black, and White women.
KEY WORDS: beauty; body; comparison; weight; race.
Women of Color have typically been left out of research, yet research findings based on White participants have often been generalized to "all women" (Zinn, 1990). In the area of body image research, the variations among women's experiences with the body and body representations, as they are affected by racial identity, have not been adequately investigated. Few researchers have even explored Women of Color and their experiences with the dominant beauty standard. It has been observed that White women seem to have a uniform notion of what "beauty" should be (Parker et al., 1995), and their conception of beauty tends to match the culturally popular images of women in mainstream media (Wolf, 1991). Black women, however, have been found less likely to hold uniform notions of beauty, and far more likely to describe beauty in terms of personality traits rather than physical ones (Landrine, Klonoff, & Brown-Collins, 1992; Parker et al., 1995).
Physical appearance is one of, if not, the major component in interpersonal interactions, and so it has been investigated extensively, beginning with the groundbreaking work of Dion, Berscheid, and Walster's description of the "beautiful-is-good" phenomenon (Dion, Berscheid, & Walster, 1972). In the United States, people who are perceived as attractive are also perceived as having positive personality traits such as intelligence, sociability, kindness, virtue, nurturance, and warmth, and they are perceived as more successful in areas of work and personal life...