When I first clicked on the Olympic news coverage about American snowboarder Chloe Kim, I was confused about who they were writing about. I didn’t recognize her in the 2026 photo because the last image I remembered of her was very different. Similarly, I had to do a doubletake when I saw a recent picture of freestyle skier Eileen Gu, whose eyes of the last Olympics had morphed into a strained, big-eyed look of perpetual surprise. 

From what I see in the media, it appears that these two talented, athletic women have been through a lot, both positive and negative – but on the whole, they’re wildly successful financially and socially. In the media, they appear to be proud of both their Asian heritage and their gender, all while embracing their positions as role models.

That’s why it’s all the more ironic, but also very telling that these two symbols of female empowerment should chase an aesthetic that is a rejection of their typical Asian features and a pursuit of the prevalent Western beauty standards.

These women didn’t come to fame and fortune primarily in the fashion and beauty industry like a Kylie Jenner, for example. Instead, they are world-class athletes, who have since built their brands and empires on the idea of empowerment. Both have social media feeds that have notions about being yourself, breaking boundaries, and owning your power. Kim is a co-founder of TogetherX, a media and commerce company that wants to “shatter the often narrow depictions of women in the media with content featuring a diverse and inclusive community of game changers, culture shapers, thought leaders, and barrier breakers.” Recently, in the context of winter sports, Gu has said, “I wanted to represent women’s empowerment.” 

But there’s something bittersweet in telling a young girl to “be yourself” while you yourself seem to strive to be someone else cosmetically. If you’re an elite athlete who can handle a 60-foot vertical drop, but you don’t feel “camera-ready” or self-confident until you’ve transformed your face into the “boundary” of a Western silhouette, the unspoken takeaway is: 1) Strength is great, but pretty is the real currency. And 2)  “pretty” means looking more white.

Eileen Gu and Chloe Kim are painful reminders that even at the top of the podium, women are still unknowingly subservient to society’s beauty standards. Perhaps both women were only able to reap the financial rewards of luxury brand sponsorships and glamour magazine spreads by being willing to glow-West their features. And of course they are exercising their rights to look however they want – it just coincidentally suggests something else. 

I don’t blame them as individuals— under the public eye, the pressure they are under to be “perfect” must be extraordinary. But I am frustrated by the system and standards that these amazing women are unwittingly validating for the world to see. Females need icons who can change the world’s eyes; instead, the world just convinced these icons that they needed to change theirs.