SI Swimsuit Models Are Rewriting Beauty Standards With Confidence

Brand stars, including Katie Austin, Jena Sims and Ellie Thumann, share how their definitions of beauty have changed over time.

Ellie Thumann and Katie Austin / Alberto Tamargo/Getty Images

Beauty standards are constantly evolving, and if you ever feel like you’re struggling to keep up, you’re not alone. Even the women who appear in the 2025 SI Swimsuit Issue have failed to adhere to the societal and cultural expectations of beauty over the years. Instead of following the crowd, these women have chosen to rewrite beauty standards by embracing what makes them uniquely beautiful instead.

“In this world, it’s already so hard to be a woman and to celebrate yourself,” choreographer, creative director and 2025 rookie Parris Goebel says. “We’re constantly being told how to act, how to dress, how to speak, how to walk. It’s challenging for us to just exist, honestly.”

Parris Goebel / Sports Illustrated Swimsuit

Celebrating strength

The pages of this year’s SI Swimsuit Issue are full of an array of women from all walks of life. From athletes to mothers to entrepreneurs and creatives, the 2025 magazine truly illustrates the vast array of beauty that exists in today’s society. While we look to Olympic athletes like Ali Truwit and Anna Hall as the epitome of athleticism and beauty, even the swimmer and heptathlete, respectively, have grappled with feeling less than confident in their own skin. Hall points out that when going through puberty, boys’ bodies work for them in sport, while girls’ tend to work against them. Truwit, meanwhile, credits her strong support system with developing a healthy body image from a young age.

“Being around people who celebrate strength made me kind of focus on that side of things instead of worrying about what my body looked like in a swimsuit. It was like, wow, what can my body do in a swimsuit—or outside of it, for that matter,” she says.

Ali Truwit / Sports Illustrated Swimsuit

Katie Austin, a five-time SI Swimsuit model and lifelong athlete, credits her mother, Denise Austin, with helping to instill healthy beauty ideals in her from a young age. And while she grew up idolizing strong, athletic women like Alex Morgan, Austin was not immune to feeling inferior when she struggled with acne in her early 20s. To draw attention away from her complexion, she wore full lash extensions on a regular basis, a notion she now believes is “crazy, thinking back about it.”

These days, Austin feels much more comfortable in her own skin by finding what makes her feel beautiful (including treating herself to good blowout or spray tan, working out and eating well) regardless of what other people think. She’s also constantly inspired by women who prioritize strength over the latest beauty trends.

“There’s so many powerful, strong women these days in sports and in the athlete world,” Austin says. “Like Ilona [Maher] for example. Strong is beautiful, strong is sexy, and as an athlete my whole life, I always believed that, but I do feel like the beauty standards are also changing where it’s like Livvy Dunne and these women who have muscles, it’s hot, it’s beautiful, it’s sexy. I do feel like a lot of the times in the eighties and nineties ... it was like, how do we lose weight, lose weight, lose weight? And now it’s like, how can we be strong? How can we be powerful? How can we lift more weights? So to me in my world, the beauty standards changed a lot for the better.”

Reflecting upon beauty ideals from childhood

Three-time SI Swimsuit model Ellie Thumann says her definition of beauty was instilled in her during her childhood, and she credits her family with reminding her to have a beautiful heart and lead with kindness above all else. Occasionally, it’s tough for her to tune out the outside pressures and commentary on societal beauty standards.

“Over the last year, I have really worked hard to get it back to the basics of what I knew growing up,” Thumann admits.

She happily rejects the myth that you must feel or look put together in order to be beautiful. In fact, Thumann says she feels her most authentic, beautiful self when she is in comfy clothes and focused inward, rather than outward.

“Meaning in my element, in a pair of cowboy boots, light makeup and feeling truly happy on the inside,” Thumann shares.

While Thumann is getting back to the beauty ideals she learned from her childhood, others are shifting away from those notions. Jena Sims, SI Swimsuit’s 2024 Rookie of the Year, grew up watching soap operas and Miss USA pageants with her mother, which influenced her ideas of beauty early on.

“ That was exactly what I thought beautiful was,” Sims tells us. “And I mean, it still is, but now to me, beautiful is just more than what’s on the outside, and that’s also what Sports Illustrated Swimsuit embodies. Beauty is what’s inside of that body—your heart, what you do with all the blessings you’ve been given. So it has absolutely nothing to do with who has the most chiseled face on Days of Our Lives.”

Sims says she’s never felt more beautiful than when she walked the Miami Swim Week runway for SI Swimsuit in July of 2023. At the time, she was pregnant with her son, Crew, who was born later that month. While she doesn’t concern herself with keeping up with beauty trends, Sims isn’t afraid to admit that she loves a good suntan to feel her most beautiful, nor does she shy away from opening up to her followers about her experience with aesthetic treatments like Radiesse or under-eye filler.

And as for the advice she’d give to her younger self where beauty standards are concerned, Sims quips, “ I would probably just tell myself that you’re gonna grow into your body and you’re gonna grow into your ears and your grandmother’s gonna buy you the boobs you never got.”