Content warning: This article discusses body image issues. 

Walking around U of T, it feels like everyone’s having a thigh-gap off with each other. It doesn’t escape me the way the cultural zeitgeist has shifted from the curvy beauty standard of yesteryear — the round hips and a fat ass — to the long-prevailing “cocaine skinny” beauty standard. 

I can’t ignore how mainstream beauty culture is regressing towards thinness as an ideal, especially for young women. The recent antagonism towards Brazilian butt lifts (BBLs), suggests that the sentiment will soon follow suit toward naturally curvy bodies as well. Meanwhile, online trends glorifying thinness as ideal, even ironically, trickle down to inevitably underpin the on-campus beauty standard. 

This standard, largely shaped by the overwhelmingly white and East Asian demographics on campus, feels at odds not only with the very recent trend of curvy bodies, but also with the Black community’s long-established feminine beauty standards. As scholar Germine H. Awad and her co-authors found in “Beauty and Body Image Concerns Among African American College Women,” the dominant body shape ideal amongst Black women is a curvy one. 

I’m sure I don’t need to go into ​​explicit detail about this, considering many hit songs from 2010 onward showcased the “Black beauty standard” in their music videos. Remember Tyga’s “Taste” featuring Offset? YG’s “Big Bank” with 2 Chainz, Big Sean, and Nicki Minaj? In plain terms, the standard was bouncy bootylicious thickness. 

I can’t pretend I didn’t feel a certain safety in those aesthetic norms. Sure, all beauty standards diminish women, but there was something almost compassionate about an ideal that didn’t outright punish you for being a little bit bigger — especially when compared to the lifelong trauma the Paris Hilton skinny era inflicted on millennial white women. Today, those millennial women are on TikTok, complaining how the “low rise is back in.” 

Meanwhile, over on our side, Black cultural standards made it so that many Black girls growing up didn’t share those anxieties nearly as much as non-Black women. A 2004 study found that Black women were more satisfied with their body size, thought of themselves as more attractive, and were less likely to have suffered a past eating disorder than white participants. In many ways, it felt comforting to think I belonged to a community which shielded me from that particular infliction of body obsession and anxiety. 

But don’t misunderstand me: where the Black community reveres certain features, it also punishes others, like being thin or ‘flat.’ I mourn for the Black girls who’ve had to navigate their self-esteem under the cruel pressure of living up to our own imagined ideals. 

While some of us luxuriated in the certain grace of knowing we weren’t automatically branded as grotesquely undesirable for our butt looking big in jeans — unlike the women of the early 2000s — I realize now that my comfort in that protection, and by proxy, my body confidence as well, only extended as far as my community’s reach. 

Coming to U of T, where Black people on campus are scarce and any Black students I met seemed shy, meant facing ideal body types from every other demographic but my own. Over time, that exposure started to chip away at the self-assuredness I naively believed occurred innately. 

I mean, seriously, I knew something was wrong with me when I turned around in the mirror, saw my ass, and thought, “It’s a bit big. Too big.” In the eighth grade, girls lined up to ask me for my squat routine. After four years at U of T, I’m standing in the mirror trying to push my thighs apart to form a fake thigh gap like it’s the 2014 Tumblr era again. 

I’m not the only one who noticed this friction between the beauty ideals of the Black and the non-Black communities at U of T. While perspectives varied, a common note ran clear: our campus, a microcosm of social hegemony, embodied a metaphorical dollhouse in which Black beauty ideals got swallowed by a larger population keen on discarding our bodies as “obsolete” or “no longer trendy.” 

Joanna Taiwo, a third-year psychology student at UTSG, described this feeling when she found herself being the only Black student in a room: “When I walked into the room, I immediately noticed that I was the only Black person there. As I sat down, I found myself looking around silently, comparing myself to everyone else: how they looked and how they carried themselves, and I felt like it was one of those moments where you become hyper-aware of how different you are from the people around you.” 

Taiwo pointed out that at UTSG, the East Asian and the white communities make up a significant portion of the student demographic. She said, “I’ve noticed that the East Asian beauty standards prioritize being as thin as possible, which is quite different from the main beauty standard in the Black community, where we like curves… I sometimes feel that my body, my features, and my presence don’t quite fit the unspoken standard that I see around.” 

I also spoke to Betty Idan, a third-year UTSG student studying information science, who pointed out how isolating it can feel to be one of the only Black students in a room. “I don’t see Black people taking enough space at U of T,” she explained. She said that when attending extracurricular club meetings, she feels the difference, “I’m the only Black girl there… It does impact people’s self-confidence and self-image because they don’t feel like they can take that space.” 

But positively, Idan voiced that, “For me personally, it doesn’t really impact my self-image or my confidence.” When asked if she noticed a beauty standard on campus, Idan described the dominant aesthetic on campus as “very petite, very dainty, on the skinnier side.” 

After reflecting on what I’d observed and received from the Black students I interviewed on campus, I realized I wasn’t alone. Beyond self-indulgent navel-gazing, speaking to other Black students about my convictions felt like a real reflection of our social condition; the Black body getting consumed and aesthetically obliterated by the dominant, thin ideal of non-Black beauty. 

While many of us grappled with this phenomenon in our own ways, many of the interviewees recommended finding a Black community as a lifeboat. In this process, it’s dawned on me that amid the social erasure of Black bodies, we, as Black people, find each other. It is in this moment of crisis that we see, affirm, and define ourselves in ways the world refuses to.

Sammy Onikoyi is a Vice-President, Equity candidate for the 2025–2026 University of Toronto Students’ Union.