On Wednesday afternoon, former chief advertising executive Seth Matlins presented Congresswomen Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) and Lois Capps (D-CA) with his petition on Change.org against overly photoshopped ads.
The petition, titled “Stop Photoshopped Ads from Hurting Our Kids,” encourages the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to pass the Truth in Advertising Act, which is a bill that would require the FTC to create strategies to reduce the amount of excessively photoshopped images in advertisements.
“The act is the outgrowth of something we’ve been working on for almost three years, and the act is a congressional bill with bipartisan sponsorship that asks the Federal Trade Commission to develop legal framework for ads that drastically change the people in them,” said Matlins in a recent interview with Fashion Times.
In his petition delivery speech on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, Matlins claimed that the excessive use of Photoshop in advertisements is making children sick.
“The fact is this… advertising that ‘photoshops’ the people in it into someone they’re not and never can be – is causing an epidemic of false and unrealistic expectations about what our children can and should look like. Chasing these expectations without ever being able to catch them – because they aren’t real – is in turn creating a widespread emotional, mental, and physical health crisis, one including eating disorders, which have the highest mortality rate of all mental illnesses.”
The petition has already garnered the signatures of almost 30,000 supporters on Change.org.
So, are we getting closer to the day when we won’t open the pages of a major magazine – or turn on our televisions – to find images of wrinkle-less, thigh-trimmed transformations of real women? It may finally be time to see truth in our advertisements, rather than glorified fiction.