Thin is in again.
While the 2010s embraced the Kardashians’ — albeit artificial — curviness, nominated Meghan Trainor’s “All About That Bass” for the Grammys Song of the Year award and lauded Lena Dunham’s sitcom Girls featuring medium and plus size bodied women, we enter 2026 with the beauty standard explicitly circling back to thinness.
United States Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has promoted conspiracy theories regarding vaccines, autism spectrum disorder and HIV/AIDS, has also turned his attention to obesity since assuming office. In Kennedy’s campaign against “Big Food,” his actions against ultra-processed foods and attention to seed oils attribute obesity mainly to diet and lifestyle, despite its proven correlations to socioeconomic and environmental factors.
The rise in GLP-1 use, oftentimes sold under the brand names Ozempic or Wegovy, has made losing weight far more attainable — for a price, of course. A simple Google search for the term “weight loss” generates not dietary advice, exercise plans or health information but advertisements for injectable drugs. Former tennis star Serena Williams posed on the weight loss drug website Ro, GLP-1 needles and pills plastered beside her.
In tandem with the cultural move towards thinner body types altogether, rates of breast augmentation surgeries, colloquially known as ‘boob jobs,’ are falling while breast reductions are rising. Following implant ruptures, a common complication of augmentation, cosmetic surgeons are seeing an increasing number of patients request smaller silicone implants as a replacement.
Fat transfer procedures, in which harvested fat from the patient’s own body is injected into their breasts, are also growing in popularity, to achieve a subtler look with a much smaller effect on cup size. This procedure dually enhances women’s chests while drawing fat from other areas of their body, such as the thigh or abdomen, perfectly subscribing to trending body types across social media.
The emerging beauty standard, with its B-cup chest, toned — but not bulky — limbs, small waist and ample butt, also has a deep, bronzed tan. While those on social media promoting this ideal are predominantly white, their skin falls victim to hours lying in the sun, sprayed with orangey hues, slathered in self tanner or enclosed in the latest rising trend: tanning beds.
Gen Z in particular is flocking to tanning beds far more often than other generations. Tanning bed users are nearly three times more likely to develop melanoma. According to a 2025 survey by the American Academy of Dermatology, 20% of Gen Z respondents indicated that they prioritize tanned skin over the health risks associated with acquiring it. In the United Kingdom, 43% of 18 to 25 year-olds use tanning beds, slightly more than the United States at 36%, according to a report by the American Medical Association.
These beauty trends may seem individually innocuous. Self tanners come with minimal health risks, a diet free of ultra-processed foods is ideal and avoiding obesity is crucial to prolonging life spans and quality.
And yet, the beauty standards currently emerging are not as harmless as they first seem. Practices primarily targeted towards women are intentionally debilitating their ability to civically engage. As we experience a period of democratic backsliding and an arguable move towards fascism, it is not a coincidence that dominating beauty standards require literal weakening to achieve them.
These practices, in tandem with one another, are creating a generation of women predisposed to skin cancer, weakened by calorie deficits and delicate from workout routines that put Pilates over weightlifting.
Perhaps the rise in breast reductions is antithetical to this point. Breast reductions can be a liberating cosmetic procedure, freeing women from excruciating back pain and limits to physical activity. Some research even points to a reduced risk of breast cancer. Still, the practice comes with the costs of most other plastic surgeries: anesthesia, painful recovery, risks of desensitization and health complications.
The same cannot be said for male beauty standards. This is not to argue that they cannot be similarly debilitating for men: while building muscle is easier for men than women, there is a spectrum within the sex that does not allow for all men to bulk at the same rates. But men have also been afforded a leniency never extended to women. The rise in appreciation of ‘dad-bods’ accommodates beer bellies and softer figures. In the twenty-first century, it is difficult, if not impossible, to find an equivalent female body type valued by men.
There is also a racial element to this phenomenon that cannot be ignored. Sabrina Strings, author of Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia, explained that during the trans-Atlantic slave trade, colonists correlated heaviness with Africans lacking the ‘intellectual capacity’ for self-discipline. Activist Lois Shearing wrote, “It is here that thin supremacy began to be used to police the borders of white womanhood, positioning it as demure, delicate and self-sacrificing.”
What these body types are ideal for is the rise of the traditional wife lifestyle — also known as tradwife — a growing conservative movement valuing women in homemaker roles while abandoning financial independence.
It is not an exaggeration to say that the right is effectively promoting a trend of ‘body fascism,’ a term coined by University of Toronto Professor Brian Pronger. People, namely women, are far easier to intellectually and physically overpower when they are feebly drained by lifestyle practices promoted as ideal. This is not pseudoscience; history has exemplified rising unattainable beauty standards during periods of right-wing shift. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s in Germany, women were encouraged to don tight corsets while men were urged to grow more muscular.
Despite claims from the right, few are advocating for an open embrace of unhealthy lifestyles. However, it is important to understand that every tanning bed appointment, Pilates class or Ozempic injection is not an independent decision. Neoliberal ideas of feminism encourage women to see every decision they make as inherently empowering, despite many subscribing to implicit elements of body fascism. It is crucial that we learn to tell the difference.