WOMEN’S BEAUTY THROUGH THE EYE OF DISNEY

by Rosario García

All along our lives we, women, have been wrongly taught through the media that if we want to be successful in life we have to be “beautiful”. We can find innumerable examples of this in Disney films such as ‘Cinderella’, ‘Snow White’, ‘Sleeping Beauty’, ‘Beauty and the Beast’ and The ‘Little Mermaid’. They are some of the better known classical films where women’s beauty is a stereotyped one, according to the standards of beauty in different times.

Nowadays a great percentage of the girls in our society when choosing a toy, choose princess costumes, cosmetics, mirrors and castles. They love the idea of being “the most beautiful ones”. This is not just a coincidence, every time we turn on the television a new explicit or implicit message is sent to our brains and, in the case of almost every princesses films, the message is: (EXTERNAL) BEAUTY leads to SUCCESS. The pressures from our society are so high that most of us, consciously or unconsciously, respond to them many times drastically changing our appearance in the pursuit of the famous “success”. Lots of hidden messages are found in the films previously mentioned.

In ‘Cinderella’, if you are beautiful enough, you may be able to escape from your terrible living conditions by getting married to a wealthy man. While Cinderella’s beauty was hidden   because she looked like a servant, dressed in rags, living with her step mother and her step sisters, the prince didn’t even know her existence. As soon as the prince looks at the beautiful Cinderella, with her beautiful dress at the ball, he deeply falls in love with her and finally they get married. (BEAUTY = SUCCESS)

Similarly, in the case of ‘Snow White’, the princess’ beauty captivates every surrounding man. (BEAUTY = SUCCESS)

“Appearances don’t matter. What counts is what’s in your heart. Unless you are the girl”, is the message we can appreciate in ‘Beauty and the Beast’. Everybody is in love with Belle and not any other girl because she is the most beautiful in town but, if Belle had been “the ugly one”, another would have been the story...  (BEAUTY = SUCCESS)

Even though Aurora, in ‘The Sleeping Beauty’, was sleeping and the prince did not know her, he fell in love with her, again, due to her beauty. (BEAUTY = SUCCESS)

Ariel, from ‘The Little Mermaid’, gave up her family, friends, changed her tail for two legs and gave up her voice because she was certain that as soon as the prince saw her beautiful face, he would fall in love with her. (BEAUTY = SUCCESS)

I cannot avoid bringing to my mind the words ‘superficiality’, ‘objectivation’, ‘discrimination’ and ‘consumerism’ as if they were synonyms of beauty. This society we live in is permanently demanding female population to be “a beautiful thing”, what leads lots of women to buy all sorts of cosmetics, dye their hairs, put on diets, making all sort of surgeries and even developing illnesses such as bulimia or anorexia, leaving aside what is really important: our essence, our identity. Sadly this is what we consume and worst of all, what our children consume. 

I think we are losing sight of what the idea of “beauty” really is. In fact, is there only one sense of beauty? Why do we all have to agree on one stereotyped beauty? What about our inner beauty? These are some of the questions I wonder whenever I watch any Disney film, and I always get to the same conclusion: "BEAUTY IS IN THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER".