How Does The Media Affect Our Perception Of Beauty?

Your body is a battleground, and every calorie you gain is a new war. This is the message that the media seems to be sending to teens and adolescents everywhere. Our perception of beauty has changed drastically in the past few decades. Now, we do not think of people of all different shapes and sizes as being beautiful and unique. Instead, we picture tall and slender women with beautiful skin and shiny hair as well as tall, muscular men… the ones we see in magazines and billboards. Teens are bombarded with these kinds of images each day and what many don’t realize is that the images of the models and celebrities we see have a whole crew working to make them look that way. The influence of the media starts early with Bratz and Barbie dolls,

What many people don’t realize is that the actresses and models that many people look up to don’t look the way they do in magazines. They have been made to look that way through makeup and Photoshop to hide any flaws that they have. In an interview with Leah Hardy, a former Cosmopolitan editor, she admitted “Thanks to retouching, our readers never saw the horrible, hungry downside of skinny.” This proves that these visions of perfection that have been shown in celebrities simply don’t exist. Yet teens cannot escape this tight grasp that the media has on them because it is estimated that an on average, a person sees 200-400 advertisements a day (experimentproject.com). In 2004, Dove started their Campaign for Real Beauty, in which they feature men and women of different shapes and sizes in their advertisements and do not retouch their photos. Even with these efforts, we do not see these types of images as often as we see the stick thin or the buff models. This makes many teenagers them believe that this is what normal looks like, or what beautiful looks like. If more companies started following Dove’s footsteps, we would be surrounded by positive messages of the perception of beauty rather than the numerous negative