Toxic beauty standards continue to pervade media, affecting women and girls as young as 10 years old. A new report by Dove found that harmful beauty standards are leading to increased body dissatisfaction and appearance based discrimination. 

Evidence showed that this unrealistic view of perfect has cost the U.S. economy $305 billion due to body dissatisfaction and $501 billion due to appearance-based discrimination. This was only mitigated by an inflation rate of 3.9 percent annually. 

"We have known for a long time that narrow and biased beauty ideals can be toxic, especially for girls' self-esteem and self-concept, and can play a role in the risk for developing an eating disorder or other serious mental health conditions," said Dr. S. Bryn Austin, founding director of the Strategic Training Initiative for the Prevention of Eating Disorders: A Public Health Incubator (STRIPED) at the Harvard Chan School of Public Health and Boston Children's Hospital. 

"We've also had a sense of how pervasive discrimination based on weight and skin shade can be, and how cruelly undermining it is in just about all facets of the lives of affected individuals. But until we did our study, we had no idea how broad reaching and enormous the impacts are on our economy. 

“By our estimates, hundreds of billions of dollars are being squandered in our economy every year. Why? Because our society has not yet been willing to reckon with the pernicious effects of sexist and racist beauty ideals and the discrimination that serves no other purpose than to enforce and perpetuate these noxious ideals. We hope our study findings will be a catalyst to begin that long-overdue reckoning," Dr. Austin said. 

Among the key findings of the study named “The Real Cost of Beauty Ideals,” were a major impact on the health care system totaling $84 billion and $221 billion in loss of well-being due to factors such as depression, suicide attempts, smoking, anxiety, eating disorders and alcohol and drug abuse. 

It is women who are bearing the brunt of these costs at a rate of 58 percent or $177 billion. These rates are even higher among women of color and women who are considered overweight or obese, at a rate of 63 percent for POC and 34 million for overweight individuals. 

Women of color are 3.4 times more likely to be judged as “unprofessional” due to their hair color, as compared to non-Black women.

"The way people feel about their bodies can no longer be considered a superficial issue, as we're seeing the devastating toll of narrow beauty standards and appearance-based bias on individuals and society as a whole," said Alessandro Manfredi, chief marketing officer for Dove. 

"The harmful beauty ideals perpetuated in media, advertising and in our social media feeds every day are negatively impacting the quality of life for women and girls, and we must take action to change this. The 'Real Cost of Beauty Ideals' report uncovers the significant scale of the harm being perpetuated from these ideals, and Dove is deeply committed to changing beauty for the better—but we need the help of others to make systemic change possible," Manfredi said.