University Honors

This capstone explores beautyism, lookism, and discrimination based on your physical appearance and attractiveness. It shapes and changes your identity, social treatment, and interactions with institutions. It extracts information from historical, scientific, and cultural perspectives. The evolution of beauty standards traces back from ancient civilizations to modern media and focuses on its three main aspects: height, weight, and facial attractiveness. It analyzes current research, media, and legal frameworks, and the capstone project shows how beauty bias affects mental health, professional opportunities, and social inclusion. The capstone also provides information on how beautyism interacts with race, gender identity, and socioeconomic status, which compound on each other, causing widespread impact of inequality. Despite this widespread impact, much of beautyism is still unknown and remains largely unchallenged by our existing laws and social norms. This capstone tackles how you can do this with broader public awareness, educational reform, and policy reform to make a more equitable society, not based on looks.