Victoria’s Secret launched in the late 1970s as a lingerie brand, originally designed to sell products in a male-friendly environment. By the 1990s, it had evolved into a cultural phenomenon. The brand no longer sold just underwear. It began selling an idea of who lingerie was for and what kind of body was meant to wear it.

Bridget Jones’s Diary, released in 2001, follows a single woman navigating work, dating, and self-improvement. From the opening scenes, the film repeatedly flags Bridget’s body, measuring and commenting on her weight in ways that go beyond incidental detail. Her size becomes part of how the character is defined.

Going to the beach shouldn’t be a measure of our aesthetic appeal. In 2015, Protein World pushed the idea that we must be at peak fitness in order to enjoy the summer. As part of a weight loss supplement promotion, the campaign showed a bikini model next to the question “Are you beach body ready?”

In 2025, Sanex ran a TV ad for shower gel that showed a Black woman’s cracked, itchy skin as the “before” and a white woman’s smooth, hydrated skin as the “after”. The tagline promised that “relief could be as simple as a shower”.

When SKKN by Kim launched in June 2022, it was pitched as the future of skincare: “science-backed,” “minimal,” “refillable.” Everything about it whispered calm sophistication. But beneath the branding sits a clear strategy — take the same extreme ideals that made the Kardashian image a global commodity and repackage them as wellness. [SKKN is] a brand that had every resource, every platform, and every opportunity to lead differently, yet chose not to.