A4 Waist Challenge

Submission 31,468

Part of a series on Photo Fads. [View Related Entries]

About

The A4 Waist Challenge, also known as the Paper Waist Challenge, is a photo fad in which women pose for photographs while holding a sheet of the A4-size paper vertically in front of their torso as to highlight their slim waistline. Since its emergence on the Chinese web in February 2016, the challenge has drawn comparisons to similar fads like the bikini bridge and "thigh gap," with critics saying that it encourages body shaming and promotes unhealthy beauty standards.

Origin

According to Mashable,^[2] women first began posting photographs of themselves holding sheets of A4 paper in front of their waist on the Chinese microblogging and social networking site Weibo in February 2016 (shown below).

Precursor: Bellybutton Challenge

During the summer of 2015, women on Weibo and Twitter began posting photographs of themselves stretching an arm around their waist and touching their navel to demonstrate having a slim waistline (shown below).^[15]

Spread

On March 15th, 2016, China Xinhua News posted a tweet^[3] referring to the photo fad as the "'A4 waist' challenge" (shown below).

Soon after, the fad began appearing on Instagram under the hashtags "#a4challenge" and "a4waistchallenge" (shown below).^[5]^[6]^[7]

On March 17th, Instagram user be.arum posted a photo of herself holding a clipboard with a paper sign reading "You don't need A4 paper to prove that you are beautiful" (shown below, left). In four days, the photo gained more than 470 likes. On March 19th, Instagram user theutoptimist posted a photograph posing with a sheet of paper held horizontally with the words "Nailed it" written on the front (shown below, middle). The following day, Instagram user thedukes_babywearingphotograph published a photo of a piece of paper with the phrase "Don't hide behind a piece of paper. You're beautiful! #A4waist" (shown below, right). Within two days, the posts gathered more than 640 and 140 likes respectively.

In the coming weeks, several news sites published articles about the A4 challenge, including the Sydney Morning Herald,^[8] The Huffington Post,^[9] Inquisitr,^[10] Tech Insider,^[11] APlus,^[12] Popsugar,^[13] Bustle,^[14] The Telegraph^[15] and The New York Times.^[16]