Quote · Fin vs History
Big Botticelli Gyal (with Paddy Young!) | The History of Beauty Standards (Part 1)
Where this was said
There's no real stunners
At 33:50 · chapter starts 29:36
The Victorian period snapped back hard from Baroque abundance: corsets made of whalebone were cinched so tight that women regularly fainted, and Victorian doctors attributed this not to physical compression but to 'the vapors' — a collapsed womb. The hourglass figure became the standard, with women trained to occupy the smallest possible space. They also adopted belladonna (nightshade) eye drops to create dreamy, dilated-pupil aesthetics, suffering side effects including blurred vision, constipation, high body temperature, confusion, and hallucinations. The hosts romanticise the idea of a woman half-dead from nightshade drops cracking pipes in the toilet as a Victorian beauty ideal. Then Fin introduces Francis Galton — Darwin's cousin who read On the Origin of Species, concluded Darwin was calling for the sterilisation of disabled people, and invented eugenics. Horatio loyally defends him as a polymath.
The Renaissance tried to make beauty mathematical — facial symmetry, classical proportions, the rediscovery of Greek and Roman ideals. Then the Baroque period swung back to 'abundant flesh', celebrating fullness and softness as the Rubenesque ideal. The pendulum never stops.
Horatio Gould argued that the modern person sees more generational stunners on Instagram before getting out of bed than their ancestors would have encountered in an entire lifetime — damaging psychological wellbeing.
