SOCIAL MEDIA-DRIVEN BEAUTY STANDARDS AND THEIR INFLUENCE ON THE BATANG TARAGSIT OF LAGUILAYAN NATIONAL HIGH SCHOOL

In today's digital age, social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok play a significant role in shaping beauty standards, influencing how adolescents perceive their bodies and self-worth. The study examined the influence of beauty standards propagated through social media on the psychosocial conditions, emotional state, and self-perception of adolescents in Batang Taragsit, Isulan, Sultan Kudarat. With Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok now actively promoting idealized standards of beauty, adolescents are more prone to experiencing body dissatisfaction, a negative self-image, or even stress and anxiety. The objectives of the study included establishing the relationship of the exposure to digital beauty standards with the body image perception and mental health concerns of adolescents. A quantitative-descriptive research design including a Likert-scale questionnaire constructed by the researchers was used to gather data from selected secondary school students from Laguilayan National High School. Descriptive statistics were used to analyze the data and measure the extent of social media content's impact on self-perception and emotional state of the participants. The findings revealed that beauty-related content exposure was significantly correlated to decreased self-esteem and increased anxiety because of social comparison.  These findings stress the urgent need for interventions like media literacy programs, parental guidance, and school-based mental health support to assist adolescents in critically assessing social media exposure and resisting detrimental beauty ideals. Furthermore, self-acceptance, body positive, and proactive media consumption should be promoted as ways to reduce the impact of such unrealistic digital beauty ideals among youth.