AN INDONESIAN BEAUTY STORY: HOW COLLEGE WOMEN IN INDONESIA REPRESENT BEAUTY, BODY IMAGE, AND SOCIAL MEDIA
Abstract
The increasing use of social media today can influence how modern society defines body image and beauty standards. The research aims to describe how Indonesian women view beauty and body image through Instagram and to define the meaning of beauty from the perspective of Indonesian female students in the new media era. The method used is a qualitative method based on in-depth interviews. The participant were three female students from various universities in Indonesia, with different ethnicities and grew up in different cities. They are interested in the beauty industry and follow several beauty influencers. The results obtained shows that there has been a shift in values and culture towards the beauty standards of Indonesian women students due to the use of Instagram. The participants believe that skin color does not always need to have a fair complexion such as that of many South Koreans and Japanese, but smooth, clean and bright skin became the standard of beauty for them. Today's beauty ideals are influenced by the presence of beauty influencers on Instagram. Participants agreed that much of the Indonesia's ideal beauty resembles a beauty influencer whose face is a mixture of Indonesian and Western physical characteristics. College women who are currently considering cosmetic surgery are no longer viewed as taboo. Following beauty influencers without considering religious and cultural elements that prohibit cosmetic surgery to beautify their appearance is now commonplace for some women in Indonesia. The conclusion of the study shows that the social media Instagram has a significant influence on the representation of ideal beauty standards and women’s body image that is dreamed of by women participating in this study.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
An author who publishes in the Jurnal Darma Agung agrees to the following terms:
- Author retains the copyright and grants the journal the right of first publication of the work simultaneously licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal
- Author is able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book) with the acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Author is permitted and encouraged to post his/her work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of the published work (See The Effect of Open Access).