BEAUTY is PAIN :) (WARNING: MIGHT GIVE YOU FOOT CRAMPS!)

Women have always had conflicting feelings about looks from the earliest of times. Sitting here thinking of what to blog about I came across some pictures of Chinese women and how they used to bind their feet. This sparked interest in looking at how things have changed in style and what is sexy and what an “acceptable” woman looks like.






Back in ancient China even now women were binding their feet. Chinese women were seen as upper class, stylish, and sexy women if they bound their feet.Binding of the feet was started as soon as the girl could walk. Their ultimate goal was to get their feet as small as possible, the empresses went as far as making her feet a size 2 at the age of 30. This process involved bandages about 2 inches wide and 2 feet long and the feet were wrapped so that the top of the foot made a hill and the toes and top of the foot curled under to meet he middle of the foot. According to various sources I read about this history of binding from girls to women sleep deprivation was common unless with the assistance of narcotics, this is because women wanted their feet so small as small as possible the pain was unbearable. These women though were left with painful scars and forever walking with fancy canes got to wear their “golden lilies,” (which were special shoes that were a privilege to wear), and that is all that mattered to them. The years of binding for the smallest of feet caused lack of circulation and infection that decayed and eventually when the bandages were changed some toes would just fall off. They definitely have coined the term “beauty is pain,” because in our society we think that we are the only ones so fixated on how skinny we can be, how our hair looks, how many Botox injections we can get to look younger as we ironically get older. These women back in old China prided themselves on the size of their feet not the size of their waste no matter what the cost sometimes even death. SO the question is how far would we go for perfection?