The young child giggles as they touch the lines of their grandmother’s face, telling her how pretty she is, unknowingly complimenting the part of her that she constantly tries to cover up.

The compliment “you’re beautiful” holds infinite meanings, evolving every time it leaves someone’s mouth. Beauty, as defined by the Cambridge Dictionary, is the possession of attractive qualities that give pleasure to those around you.

However, when an adult tells a child they’re beautiful, they surely are not referring to the child’s physical appearance, as they would for an adult. Instead, they could be referring to the style of their hair, their excited eyes, the brightness of their smile or their energetic spirit.

Paly students have grown up on a foundation of beauty standards that continue to shape their ideals today. Junior Jaslynn Lee has noticed the way this groundwork affects the Paly community in her day-to-day life.

“Kids are introduced to conventional beauty standards from a very young age, which they use as a way to define their own self-worth,” Lee said. “They also rely on these compliments and recognition, and that really impacts how they view themselves.”

This has led to the human tendency to compare oneself with others, creating beauty standards that are continuously changing and have affected people’s ideas of self-worth for centuries.

Adam Fingerhut, a Loyola Marymount University psychology professor and associate dean of faculty development, has spent his career studying and teaching students about human behavior.

“Beauty standards and these idealized preferences are derived naturally over the course of evolution,” Fingerhut said.

Although the definition of what is considered beautiful has morphed throughout the decades, these standards still remain a prominent part of society, especially among high school students.

“People are trying, probably more than they did at a younger period in their life, to establish independence and an individualized sense of self,” Fingerhut said. “They ask themselves, ‘What marks me as different, and in many ways, better than those around me?’ Beauty standards are certainly one marker on which people are evaluating their self-worth.”

Even though this issue is often perceived to be skewed towards girls, it impacts people of all genders. For instance, junior Arthur Blanch has felt the pressure to conform to social norms via his style since elementary school.

“My definition of beauty is really different from older generations, just because of how much everything has changed and how much the culture has changed,” Blanch said. “There is such a big difference in what people consider beautiful now that most people have completely different beauty standards than the older generations.”

In recent years, social media has only worsened self-comparison, giving way to new insecurities that are constantly broadcasted through different platforms. Fingerhut continues to witness the shift in human comparison through his students every year.

“It [social media] has made social comparison more prevalent in our lives,” Fingerhut said. “We’re constantly seeing representation of what’s happening around us more frequently and in a way that we haven’t in previous times in human history.”

However, the constant exposure to people’s lives through social media is notoriously known to show only one side, leading to false assumptions that what they share is their full reality.

“We compare ourselves to standards that are likely unrealistic without simultaneously confronting that those standards are human-made and therefore flawed,” Fingerhut said.

Equivalently, freshman Enzo Matsuzawa does his best to stay as true to himself as possible, yet he still feels the effects of social media on his self-image.

“Social media creates an environment where people only see the best of the best, and it leads to a certain vision people have on how they should look,” Matsuzawa said. “It’s really easy to start comparing yourself to other people and pressuring yourself to look a certain way.”

Right now, the cosmetics industry is heavily focused on artificial products that are promoted as an easy and fast way to prevent wrinkles, dark circles and other traits deemed undesirable by society. Nonetheless, beauty standards have always existed in advertisements — specifically, in the beauty industry and Hollywood.

“They [beauty standards] inevitably shift and change over time, because they are created by us, whether that’s through artificial means like marketing and advertising shifting and shaping what is valued in a culture,” Fingerhut said.

Regardless of the ever-fluctuating beauty norms, one ideal that has been stressed among countless generations is the need to stay youthful despite the natural aging process. Currently, the youth is doing so through a fixation on maintaining clear skin.

“The beauty industry is obsessed with youth and myriad creams and injections that are sold to keep people looking young,” Fingerhut said. “It’s a multi-billion dollar industry that people invest in to hold on as long as they can to what is idealized in our society.”

Another unconventional norm that is projected — not only through television but also in society itself — is the fixation on Eurocentric traits.

“There’s some interesting work on the way that Afrocentric versus Eurocentric traits are perceived in the workforce, . . . showing that in a job context, Eurocentric features, so things like straight hair, are preferred over different features,” Fingerhut said. “[This] puts a lot of pressure and is an unnecessary and unrealistic standard for people who exist outside of white.”

As beauty ideals are changed and personalized for each generation, senior Camille Trimbur has observed that age plays a role in how individuals perceive themselves and others.

“I do think that as a generation, we tend to think more of outward beauty instead of beauty within, which I feel was more prominent in the past,” Trimbur said.

Similarly to how Trimbur has noticed the differences between her generation’s beauty norms and the generations before her, Fingerhut has experienced a shift of his own in his age group.

“The older you get, the less you care about other people’s perception of you and opinion of you, ” Fingerhut said. “There is less of a need for that social approval. Now, I don’t think we ever completely divorce ourselves from a need for social approval, but there is something about age and one’s understanding of themselves that makes it so that the need for approval is smaller and perhaps less powerful.”

Not everyone has been able to find confidence in their natural beauty as fluidly as some, Fingerhut points out that older generations have become more comfortable in their own skin.

“For every aging person who is committed to looking young, there is likely another aging person who says, ‘I’m fine, just the way I am,’” Fingerhut said.

Sixty-year-old clinical psychologist Shayna Kaufmann recalls growing up in the ‘70s and feeling the pressure to fit the image she would always see in popular magazines and programs. Recently, as she has matured, she was able to detach herself from this stress.

“Though I still want to look my best, it doesn’t matter as much,” Kaufmann said. “I probably leave the house more frequently without makeup on than with makeup on, and I don’t feel any less attractive.”

As Kaufmann has developed emotionally, her appreciation for the natural beauty of the world has also increased.

“With every decade that I aged, my appreciation of beauty took a different form,” Kaufmann said. “I see more of people’s inner light shine through with less notice of the shell. I no longer see unkind people as beautiful, as their inner self makes the outside so much less appealing.”

Gunn High School sophomore Sophie Winkler-Hahns’ definition of beauty is less focused on the conventional standard and rather on the bigger picture. While for some it may take their whole life to come to accept themselves, Winkler-Hahn has been able to step outside of the ideals for her age group, finding beauty in her surroundings.

“Someone can be beautiful because of how they treat others, not just how they look,” Winkler-Hahn said. “When I was younger, I thought beauty was all about looks, but now I see it’s also about how someone makes you feel.”