In the twenty-first century, girls and women are undergoing cosmetic surgery to remodel their bodies or facial features, reduce the markers of ageing and lighten their skin, so the question of how the female beauty ideals that hold today came to be standardised and disseminated in the nineteenth century is especially significant. Western beauty and fashion industries still grapple with an overwhelming promotion of whiteness and creation of products designed for white skin. Ideas about ‘natural’ beauty as superior to ‘artificial’ beauty continue to underwrite modern cosmetic advertisements and plastic surgery procedures, with a ‘natural’ or ‘undetectable’ look to any product, facelift or implant being the desired outcome for most women. Most of all, the idea that beauty is of prime importance to girls and women remains predominant in an era of social media and Instagram ‘influencers’, even as the cultural conditions surrounding marriage, employment and family have substantially transformed.

What it was to be feminine was transformed by the significant changes wrought in relation to women's appearance through print culture in the Victorian period. Elizabeth Carolyn Miller contends that since the nineteenth century, femininity ‘has been constituted more and more by self-administered regimens of healthy, beauty, fashion, and appearance’ (83). Everyone from Victorian beauty and style experts such as Eliza Haweis to contemporary feminist writers have argued that women take pleasure in, and make subversive use of, beauty culture. More common, however, is the suggestion that beauty norms – and their extreme manifestations, such as beauty contests – limit women. Robyn Cooper, for example, suggests that patriarchal culture ‘assigned beauty to woman’ in order to control women's bodies and secure their ‘subordination’ (51). The continued figuration of beauty as women's preserve and a form of social power that must be fought to be retained into middle and old age is indicative of the ongoing subordination of women through their physical appearance.