No matter how hard you try, you’ll have a hard time finding a person which everyone (and we mean literally everyone) else finds beautiful. We are all different and have different tastes as well as our own ideas about what beauty is. On the other hand, it’s impossible not to notice that many notions of beauty are affected by our cultures and customs. To illustrate this further, we’ve prepared a list of the most popular beauty trends around the world. While you might be familiar with some of these, we’ve done our best to throw in a few which might surprise you.

Strange Nails

This is one trend that originated on the internet, which is why we can’t exactly pinpoint the country of origin. While long and healthy nails have long been considered a sign of beauty, these days it’s more about extravagance than anything else. As you can see on Instagram, ladies have been showing off some pretty bizarre nail trends. For example, there is a nail technician who made the girl’s nails look like teeth and another who made her nails into small, bejeweled corkscrews. While these might look interesting on your Instagram feed, we can’t imagine how difficult it must be to do regular, everyday things such as washing your face or unlocking your car.

India and Africa

In Asia and Africa, girls decide to undergo some serious (not to mention possibly dangerous) treatments in order to get lighter skin. Because light skin is considered beautiful in many Asian and African countries, it doesn’t come as a surprise that skin whitening and brightening products are extremely popular. It’s funny that so many people living in North America always want to get tanned and have darker skin, while on the other side of the world women are doing everything they can to lighten it. Keep in mind that both bleaching and darkening your skin can be very dangerous.

Australia

As with many other Western cultures, Australians are all about staying young. Even though they’re well-known for their laid-back attitudes and being cool, they also work hard to stay young and beautiful. A lot of men and women in their forties have a number of a good cosmetic surgeon memorized on their phones and they regularly get some procedures done, like volume replenishment or anti-wrinkle treatment. Fortunately for everyone, medicine and technology have advanced a lot over the past few years and today there are many different ways to keep your skin, lips, eyes, and body looking as young as one feels.

South-east Asia

A trend that shyly emerged a couple of years ago is still going strong: fake braces are a thing in South-east Asia. While ladies in the US want their teeth to be straight and pearly white and the ladies in Japan are undergoing procedures that will make their teeth “adorably crooked”, kids from Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand are getting fake braces in order to look cool. With a number of Asian pop-stars wearing them proudly, it was a matter of time when kids would catch on. Not to mention that braces are very expensive and that wearing them is a sign of prestige.

South Korea

In the United States, women put on their makeup and eyeliner to make their eyes more cat-like, but in South Korea, things are a bit different. A great number of women decide to get surgery in order to make their eyes bigger and wider. This procedure is called epicanthoplasty and as a result, their eyes are wider which is considered very beautiful in their culture. What is more, it’s not just the girls who get this procedure done, but some men choose to do it too.

Weird eyebrows

We can’t finish without at least mentioning another strange (if not outright weird) internet trend that’s been around for the past year – strangely shaped eyebrows! We’ve witnessed everything, from flowers in eyebrows, braided eyebrow hair, halo brows, and feather brows too. It leaves us wondering what we’ll see next.

As you can see, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and some of the things people find beautiful and appealing, others may find strange and not particularly appealing. By understanding that other people and other cultures have different norms than the ones we’re used to will help us be more accepting and open-minded. Trends change every single day, and the things we find beautiful today will probably be seen as ridiculous in ten years or so, which is why we should all try to accept ourselves just the way we are.