Real Women Have Curves: Who Decides What Counts as Real?
“Real women have curves” is one of those phrases that sounds generous and empowering until anyone thinks about what the word "real" is doing in it. It comes from Josefina López’s play of the same name, first staged in 1990 and later made into a film, about Mexican-American women in a small East Los Angeles sewing factory dealing with low pay, immigration worries, family expectations and a steady stream of comments about their weight. In that setting, the title defended women who were constantly being told to shrink. Since then it has been picked up by beauty brands, printed on posters and repeated across Instagram, which raises an awkward question: if real women have curves, what does that make the women who don’t?
What "Real Women Have Curves" Originally Meant
López based the play on her own life. As a teenager she was undocumented, working in a sewing factory, and convinced she would never get to college. In the 2002 film, America Ferrera plays Ana García, whose mother, Carmen, comments on her weight constantly, down to nagging her about eating cake at her own party. On a stiflingly hot day at the factory, Ana takes off her clothes and carries on working in her underwear. Carmen is mortified, but the other women follow Ana's lead, and before long they are comparing stretch marks and cellulite and laughing about them. For women used to hearing their bodies criticised, it's a moment of looking at those bodies with pride, and it's the clearest picture of what the title meant.
As beauty advertising tends to do, it picked the phrase up, took it out of context, and ran with it. In April 2004, Dove launched its firming range in the UK with billboards of six women in plain white underwear, none of them professional models, and the line "New Dove Firming. As tested on real curves." The campaign grew out of Dove's own research into how women felt about their bodies, became the start of the Campaign for Real Beauty, and plenty of women were genuinely pleased to see bodies like theirs on a billboard. The awkward part was what they were selling: a cream to reduce the look of cellulite, promoted by celebrating the curves it was designed to tighten. Real curves were beautiful, as long as they were firm.
In 2017, the fast-fashion brand Zara managed something even more baffling. Irish broadcaster Muireann O’Connell photographed a poster in a Dublin store advertising the brand’s curve jeans with the slogan “Love your curves”, modelled by two very slim models. She aptly captioned it “You have got to be s****ing me, Zara”. The post went viral, and she followed up to make it clear the models weren’t the problem, the marketing was; and it’s hard to disagree: Zara had designed jeans for women with curves, then told those women to love their shape on a poster that didn’t appear anywhere in the ad.
Neither campaign set out to insult anyone, but that’s the trouble with calling one kind of body “real”: every other body becomes the less real version by default. A slim woman walking past Dove’s billboard was being told hers wasn’t "the real" one, and a woman whose curves were in her chest rather than her hips might reasonably wonder whether hers counted. López’s line was written for women who had been made to feel their bodies were wrong. When brands started using it, they just shifted the exclusion onto a different group of women.
Slim-Thick: Skinny and Curvy At Once!
For years, thin and curvy were sold as two separate ideals, which suited the beauty industry nicely because each came with its own shopping list. Women chasing thin were offered diets, slimming teas and weight-loss plans, while women chasing curves were offered waist trainers, padded shapewear and surgical bum and breast enhancements. In the late 2010s the two ideals merged into what Instagram named "slim-thick": a tiny waist and flat stomach sitting on top of big shapely hips, thighs and bum, as modelled by the Kardashians. Because "slim-thick" is technically a bigger, healthier-looking body than the size zero look of the 2000s, it often gets talked about as a step towards inclusivity. In reality, it's just another unrealistic standard that asks for fat to disappear from the waist while staying firmly on other parts of the body, a combination no diet or workout plan can deliver on demand.
Researchers at York University in Toronto tested the "more inclusive" claim in 2022. They showed 402 female undergraduates Instagram images of thin, fit or slim-thick bodies, while a control group looked at pictures of home décor. Every body type left women feeling worse about their own bodies than the décor did, which is not a great result for any of them, but slim-thick did the most damage, more than the thin ideal, and women who already held themselves to perfectionist standards about their appearance were hit hardest. The lead researcher, Sarah McComb, concluded that a bigger ideal isn't automatically a healthier one, and warned that comparing against these images can feed disordered eating in people who are already vulnerable.
The York researchers also pointed out that images like these are routinely edited, and Kim Kardashian has faced more than one round of criticism over photos that appear to have been altered. Between editing apps, filters, shapewear and cosmetic procedures, it's often impossible to tell how much of a slim-thick body online belongs to the person in the picture, which makes it a strange choice of body to hold up as what real women look like.
Beauty ideals have gone from waif-thin to curvy to slim-thick in the space of a few decades, and the women in López's factory weren't trying to add another one to the list. When the other women in the play ask Ana why she doesn't lose weight, she says, "Because I like myself!" It's still the best line connected to the title, partly because it doesn't depend on Ana's body matching anything, and partly because it doesn't need anyone else's body to be less real for hers to count.
Index:MH sets measurable standards for how the beauty and fashion industry affects consumer mental health. To find out more about our work, visit indexmh.org.
