With “Snow White,” Laufey Offers a Kind of “Pressures of Beauty Standards” Foil to Xtina’s “Beautiful”

Although the 2000s, especially to Gen Z (and now, Gen Alpha), seem like ages ago (or, as Lorde puts it on Solar Power’s “Mood Ring,” “Don’t you think the early 2000s seem so far away?”), the decade is currently rather omnipresent. Not just in matters of recycled pop culture (see: Final Destination: Bloodlines and Freakier Friday), but also in terms of the one thing that apparently can’t be shaken from said era: the impossible beauty standards that prompted Christina Aguilera to defiantly declare on 2002’s “Beautiful,” “I am beautiful/No matter what they say/Words can’t bring me down.” 

Chief among these impossible beauty standards is, predictably, being thin (or, as it was called in the 90s, “heroin chic”). With weight as the constant, evergreen battleground that women have to contend with in a way that men simply do not. For, in contrast to women, they can pretty much be fat tubs of lard and still get laid (such is the rarity of available, “passable” straight men). However, there was a brief blip there, somewhere between the late 2010s and early 2020s, when the notion of “body positivity” was having a moment, but now, there’s no denying that the “thin is a religion” trend has come back at full force (complete with even Lizzo forgoing her erstwhile “big is beautiful” mantra). This, in part, spurred by the reemergence of 00s fashions like ultra-low-rise jeans and belly-exposing tops (an aesthetic once best embodied and championed by Paris Hilton). Not to mention the widespread availability of Ozempic giving people an “easy way” (of course, somewhere down the line, “the catch” to this “miracle drug” will make itself known) to slim down and adhere to the reinforced beauty standard that “fat” is ugly. And, bear in mind, that word would even be used on someone like Marilyn Monroe in the present climate—she who was a normal, healthy size (and deemed a sex symbol for it). 

With all of this in mind as a barometer for where culture is at, the theme of “Snow White,” Laufey’s latest single from the forthcoming A Matter of Time, makes a lot of sense. Indeed, in the tradition of songs that push back on and/or heart-wrenchingly acknowledge the pressures of dangerous (both for physical and mental health) beauty standards, it arrives at a time when it bears reminding the masses of just how psychologically damaging it is to be obsessed with/hyper-aware of one’s looks at all times. Wielding Snow White more as a symbol of the magic mirror used in the fairy tale—the mirror that announces to the Evil Queen that Snow White is the “fairest of them all”—it pointedly reflects society’s current (and simultaneously antiquated) views on women…or, more accurately, how women “should” look. And the view isn’t pretty at all. 

Though it is pretty in terms of Laufey’s shooting location for the accompanying video, once again directed by her twin, Junia Lin (who also directed the recent “Lover Girl” video). Setting the stage in the “pure as snow” south of Iceland (Laufey’s native land, and also a milieu that Addison Rae got on board with for “Headphones On”), the melancholic tone of the track is immediately apparent in the acoustic strings (courtesy of co-production by Laufey and Spencer Stewart) that set the stage for Laufey to sing, “Can’t help but notice all of the ways/In which I failed myself, I failed the world all the same/I don’t think I’m pretty, it’s not up for debate/A woman’s best currency’s her body, not her brain.” Talk about a gut-punching verse to kick things off. 

And yes, once again, Laufey is majorly channeling some Billie Eilish vibes in terms of her sound and intonation (with “What Was I Made For?” in particular coming to mind). Even the environment she’s roaming around in—outfitted in a loose-fitting white dress (lending her a deliberately ethereal appearance)—is reminiscent of the location Eilish uses in the video for “Your Power” (itself very reminiscent of the setting in Britney Spears’ “I’m Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman”). To be sure, like “Your Power,” “Snow White” is also a track that, at its core, addresses the ways in which men treat women, particularly younger ones, like currency based on their beauty and age (with more youthful women always being especially prized by older men for their “malleability”).

As for the alternating scenery between a spring and winter backdrop in “Snow White,” it feels representative of the ways in which women are hyper-aware of the season “setting” on their beauty. On the time when they’ll still be considered “valuable” to society, since it’s constantly reiterated in ways both subtle and overt that “old” women have no place within it (case in point, the recent cancellation of And Just Like That… for reasons beyond just the unhinged plotlines). 

So it is that Laufey woefully (and rightfully) pronounces, “The world is a sick place, at least for a girl/The people want beauty, skinny always wins/And I don’t have enough of it/I’ll never have enough of it.” This idea of never being “enough,” no matter how “hot” you manage to make yourself look by conventional standards is also addressed by Aguilera on “Beautiful” (and fittingly so, since Laufey is providing a reaction that mirrors the 00s beauty ideals presently being peddled) via the lyrics, “Now and then I get insecure/From all the pain/I’m so ashamed.” Indeed, the ways in which women are conditioned to only value themselves based on other people’s opinions of their beauty is a phenomenon that still has yet to subside. 

What’s more, that the song has been released on the heels of a “vintage” Maxim list from 2007 called “Top 5 Unsexiest Women Alive” going viral is a telling reminder of how the 00s—recently romanticized by Gen Z—were an extremely harrowing time for women. And, rightly so, the list prompted the question, “How did any woman survive the 2000s?” Many didn’t (see: Britney Spears, a husk of her former vibrant self). This question is a stark reminder of why it’s so important not to go back to “that place” in terms of glamorizing a very impossible and mentally harmful standard of beauty. One that Laufey speaks to with her usual brand of poetic, thoughtful eloquence on “Snow White.”