PEOPLE DO SOME CRAZY THINGS TO look beautiful. In the US, the beauty standard for women is “deathly thin.” As a result, a lot of women either starve themselves or throw up their food in order to look beautiful. Other countries could conceivably look at that and think, “That’s kinda barbaric,” and they wouldn’t be totally wrong.
But people all over the world do really crazy things to become beautiful. In Mauritania, for example, it’s beautiful to be heavier. So women their do the exact opposite of women in the US: they eat a lot of food. To the point where they’re basically force-feeding girls. In neither case is this particularly healthy, but it just goes to show that what’s considered “beautiful” is subjective. Beauty Flash created this infographic breaking down some of the most shocking beauty traditions from around the world.