: Re: How do I express that a culture has a different standard of beauty? I am aware that there are lots of different ways to do this. I'm being subtle about it thus far. Our standards of beauty

@Samaraweera193

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The most natural way to do this is just to have characters from the culture, in the story, comment on the traits of someone they find beautiful. People often do this in real life, so it shouldn't be too hard to do this subtly.

If you really want the culture to feel fully realized, however, you might think about the entire range of differences that surround the different beauty standard. I would imagine a culture that celebrates thinness as being more ascetic and goal focused, and one that celebrates a heavier body type as being more sensual and pleasure focused. Compare these two real life quotes from different sub-cultures. "I hate her, she's so skinny!" (one woman envious of another in a thin-oriented culture). "Man, she thick as hell!" (a man boasting to a friend about the attractive heft of a woman in a buxom-oriented culture).

I believe thin-orientation is more common in the societies where food is plentiful and obesity is common, heavy-orientation is more common in places where food is scarce, something you might want to consider. You also want to think about about perjorative terms being reversed. For instance, your culture wouldn't use the term "overweight" because that implies being heavier is wrong. Conversely, they might say "scrawny" instead of "skinny." The subgenre of African-American romance novels is a good place to find fiction from a sub-culture with a tendency to be oriented towards heavier body types. Alexander McCall Smith's well-known Number 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series, set in Botswana, might be another good place to look.

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