Looking beautiful vs feeling healthy

For a perfect woman's body, there seems to be a new "standard": iPhone 6 legs and 100-yuan wrists.

Six women working for a company reportedly coined the term iPhone 6 legs. It means placing the 13.8-centimeter-long iPhone 6 horizontally on a woman's knees, and only if it covers both knees can she be said to have iPhone 6 legs. The term 100-yuan wrist refers to wrapping a woman's wrist with a 100-yuan note. If the banknote encircles the wrist, she has a 100-yuan wrist.

The so-called beauty standard has gone viral online. A rough search of hashtag #iPhone 6 legs on Sina Weibo, a popular micro-blogging site in China, threw up hundreds of thousands of posts from young girls gleefully displaying their slim legs for their "success" or with despairing looks for their failure to meet the "standard".

A series of bizarre standards for a perfect figure have emerged in recent years. Previous crazes include having "abdominal muscles like the edge of a vest" (majia xian), "taking a hand around the back and touching the navel", "placing coins in the hollows of collarbones" and "tucking a pencil beneath breasts".

A very recent trend had thousands of young women posting photos of them posing with a piece of A4 paper held vertically in front of their waists to show how slim they were. A waist that the 21-cm wide A4 sheet covers is considered ideal.

The pursuit of beauty (or a beautiful figure) is not new. Legend has it that Zhao Feiyan, an empress during the Western Han Dynasty (206 BC-AD 24), weighed so little that she could "dance on a man's palm". Zhao's petite figure became the model for maids in the palace and some even starved to death to look like her.

During the Tang Dynasty (618-907), however, things were different. Yang Yuhuan, a famous imperial concubine, was famed for her beauty, yet she had a buxom figure. So plump, curvaceous women became the rage.