The nipple standard: a new frontier in female insecurity

The winds have changed, and there’s a new standard on the street. From the body to the breast, we’ve officially zoomed in all the way to the nipple — the latest frontier in the beauty industry’s mission to perfect what was never imperfect.

We’ve long passed “Free the Nip” territory — they’ve been liberated since the early 2010s — but freedom comes with fine print in the sans bra era.

Apparently, you can take off the bra, but you can’t take off the beauty standards. 

Not so long ago, nipples peeking through a shirt earned an email from HR. One blast of the AC, and you’ve been betrayed! Yesterday, we were buying bras and pasties to hide them; today, we’re apparently buying tint, filler and “faux nipple bras” to make them harder, pinker, perkier and better?

I’m not sure when we suddenly found the free time to scrutinize frivolous body parts like nipples, but here we are: naked, overanalyzed and broke. What’s next, performance reviews for belly buttons? 

Frankly, this wasn’t an insecurity I even knew existed until I was asked to write this article. It wasn’t until I brought it up to my girlfriends that my self-scrutiny lenses went on. 

“Yours are darker than mine.” 

“Are they supposed to be this big?”

“Why do they sit like that?”

Before we knew it, we were inspecting each other like curious monkeys at the zoo. And for a split second, against my will, I caught myself slipping into the herd … Is there really such a thing as perfect nipples?

I suppose we can thank the usual suspects for the origins of this thinking. Damn those Europeans. For centuries, Eurocentric ideals have quietly dictated what the “perfect” breast should look like, nipples included. Light skin. Small areola. Proportionately centred, but with a flirty outward lean. Pale pink preferred, though there’s wiggle room for light brown, just not too brown (we wouldn’t want to be too inclusive). 

The beauty industry hasn’t exactly rebelled against that legacy. Take Benetint, the cult makeup product that’s been tinting cheeks since the late ’80s. It was originally created in 1976 to make exotic dancers’ nipples pop. 

Fast forward a few decades, and “perky” is the new “sexy.” For women not genetically “blessed” with symmetrical, eternally alert nipples, there’s now a menu of solutions: hyaluronic acid filler to plump them up, or bras engineered to simulate that cold-room effect.  

In October 2023, Kim Kardashian’s clothing brand Skims released the “Ultimate Nipple Push-up Bra,” complete with built-in, permanently erect nipples to achieve that braless look. Once something to hide, hard and excited nipples could be yours for a modest $128. 

Are you hearing how ridiculous this sounds?

We’ve gone from hiding nipples to paying for fake ones that do exactly what we were trying to hide in the first place. That’s the beauty industry in a nutshell. First, it’s taboo. Then, it’s trendy. But at the end of the day, it’s never free. 

Have we become so shallow that we’ll spend hundreds on bras, and even pump filler into our nipples, just to achieve a look that promises validation from a system designed to make us insecure? It’s an old formula with a modern face: where a beauty standard exists, there’s insecurity and a market ready to exploit what it helped create. 

But despite knowing this, we keep falling for it. We know the “perfect” nipple doesn’t exist, just like the perfect body, skin tone or nose doesn’t either. These are Eurocentric beauty standards, perpetuated by a scrolling addiction. The algorithm whispers, the influencer echoes and suddenly you’re wondering if your nipple looks weird or if it’s just the lighting. 

Let’s be honest: no one is thinking about your nipples as much as you are. Whoever you’re worried about seeing your nipples is probably just really grateful to see them. Period.

Perfectionism is the cage we’ve been told liberates us. How much precious time are you willing to spend looking down at your chest? I say, that’s up to you. Just know that somewhere, a marketing executive is taking notes and inventing the next solution to make you doubt something that was already perfect.