Background

Most adolescent girls in India are unhappy with how they look, and it usually has very little to do with how they actually look. A study of 1,220 girls in Coimbatore found that 77.6 percent were dissatisfied with their bodies, and that girls whose weight was entirely healthy were dissatisfied at almost the same rate as everyone else. 

In India, those lessons are specific, as skin tone carries a weight here that it does not carry everywhere. In one experiment, 108 mothers of marriage-age children were shown profiles listing only education and work, then a photograph of the candidate. The photograph was of the same person each time, with only the skin tone altered on a computer. Their preferences shifted with the shade. Girls pick this up early, usually from the people closest to them, and it shapes more than how they feel. A study that followed over 300 girls aged fourteen to eighteen through two seasons of sport found that the worse a girl felt about her appearance, the less she enjoyed playing and the more likely she was to quit. Self-consciousness about the body is one of the main reasons girls leave sport in adolescence. A girl who has been taught to watch herself tends to withdraw from the things that would have shown her what her body can do. The one hopeful thing in all of this is that none of these standards are fixed. They vary from one culture to the next, they change from one generation to the next, and they are passed down rather than born into. 

Beauty in Translation was founded in September 2026 to open that up with the girls themselves, helping them see where these expectations come from, talk about them honestly, and build confidence in their bodies through what those bodies can do.