Content area
Full Text
1.
Introduction
It is beyond dispute that we live in an overwhelmingly visual culture, where our appearances are constantly evaluated by others. The consumer culture of the western world encourages us to invest unlimited effort to attain the best version of ourselves by looking and sounding right for a certain job or to meet the requirements of the modern dating game. Despite all the effort invested in our appearance, we are told that looks are unimportant and is a sign of shallowness and vanity to overly focus on what we perceive in the mirror. Still, it is apparent that visually appealing people tend to be rewarded in various ways for their appearance in our society. In this respect physical appearance is comparable to a form of capital, which can be exploited and accumulated in economic and social exchange (e.g. Anderson et al. , 2010; Sarpila, 2013; Holla and Kuipers, 2015). Here we refer to this type of capital as aesthetic capital that can be understood as a combination of different resources or assets related to physical appearance including facial beauty, body shape, size and physique, as well as styles of grooming and clothing (Anderson et al. , 2010).
Our research contributes to the ongoing discussion about physical appearance and social stratification. Previous research on physical appearance and social stratification has to a large extent concentrated on the consequences of possessing or not possessing appearance-related assets. These include social (Mulford et al. , 1998), socio-economic (e.g. HaIrkoInen, 2007; Glass et al. , 2010; HaIrkoInen et al. , 2011; Sala et al. , 2013), as well as sociobiological (e.g. Jæger, 2011; McClintock, 2014) consequences. The aim of our paper is to shed light on the mechanisms through which physical appearance confers economic and social benefits. The paper does this by studying the social norms that lie behind these social and economic consequences.
We argue that possibilities to convert aesthetic capital to social or economic advantages vary according to gender. Recent empirical studies suggest that women, in particular, might actually have more limited possibilities to use their physical appearance in such an exchange (Mears, 2015; Kuwabara and Thébaud, 2017). Furthermore, previous research indicates that the norms which regulate the use of aesthetic capital in economic and social exchange...