‘Pretty healthy’: Authenticity and the incorporation of beauty ideals into health discourse

This article examines how students at an urban high school in Aotearoa New Zealand navigate the relationship between beauty ideals and authenticity. The students privilege ‘personality’ over appearance, positioning appearance as detracting from personality. They conceive many appearance ideals to be ‘fake’, and believe that to present the self in line with these ideals is to present an inauthentic self. The students frame themselves as media literate, producing ‘sad’ Others who cannot ‘see through’ the mediated construction of beauty ideals. In addition to distancing themselves from these Others, the students use the tropes of fun and selfgrowth to frame their emulation of (and/or desire to emulate) appearance ideals as authentic expressions of their selves, rather than the desire to be seen as attractive. Most effectively, in line with the increasing amalgamation of beauty into health discourses, the students reposition appearance ideals as ‘health’ ideals, thus 28 incorporating appearance ideals into the sphere of the authentic. In doing so, the students distance themselves from the ‘sad’ feminized Other that is consumed with her looks, which allows them to position themselves as empowered rational subjects who adhere to beauty ideals ‘for themselves’ rather than for others.