"Pretty Hurts" critique - Tristan Ashton

The music video for Beyoncé’s hit song “Pretty Hurts” takes us down the road of makeup and fashion trends onto the stage of a beauty contest. With instrumental backing from Elad Marish and funding from Columbia Records, Beyoncé sets out to showcase the shockingly brutal nature of the beauty industry.

In the video, we go behind the scenes of a beauty pageant to the extensive preparation and competition of the contestants. Our protagonist (Beyoncé, of course) is so obsessed with trying to be the most beautiful that she uses everything from shiny-skin aerosols and teeth-whitening powders to Botox facial injections and bulimic purging. This, of course, brings us to the theme of the video: Beyoncé is telling us that in the rush to meet the ever-tightening standards of beauty, women lose sight of themselves and their health in favor of external gratification. However, I will address this in a slightly sideways manner. Throughout the video, there are multiple shots of other women at the pageant who throw scornful looks at Beyoncé as she prepares herself for the stage. Her discomfort is readily apparent, and this discomfort drives her into more frantic preparations to the point of even going to the bathroom to throw up multiple times (with the implication that she is used to this situation because she does it anyway). This opens up a corollary to the nominal theme of “impossible beauty standards harm the well-being of impressionable women (and men, although the video only focuses on women)”: Beyoncé is also telling us that additional yet slightly hidden harm can come from allowing the judgments of others to affect how you see yourself. In the context of the video, I say that this extra harm is “hidden” because it is buried under the guise of the pressure of competition. But in reality, our protagonist is basing her confidence and self-worth on the opinions of others.

This extends even farther into the video, to the scene where the top two contestants are interviewed. The host congratulates Beyoncé and asks, “What is your aspiration in life?” She falters in her answer because she has no answer, and can only stutter out “My aspiration in life…Well that’s a great question.” She has spent all this time building her external image up in the eyes of others, but has completely neglected to build herself up on the inside. As a result of her hard work, she has thus achieved success as a shiny, skinny, gorgeous, but totally empty vessel. She stands as an idol for all society, to be sure.

Beyoncé’s video is undoubtedly concerned with showing how harmful near-impossible standards of beauty can be. However, what must also be realized is the correlation between thinking of beauty and allowing the judgments of others to enter one’s consciousness. The physical toll is readily apparent through unhealthy bodily modifications and practices such as Botox injections and purging, but the psychological toll of emptying oneself for others cannot and should not be neglected.