We all follow our favorite celebrities on Instagram and look at the Victoria Secret clothes online, wishing we looked more like the models. Although it may seem like they have it all, nice hair, clear skin and of course the perfect body… you should know that they really don’t look like this and it isn’t good to compare yourself to these models and celebrities.
The media is really good at distorting our views of beauty. Every magazine photo is Photoshopped to make the women on the covers look way more attractive than what they really are. Those are the types of things that we choose to surround ourselves with, so eventually we begin to wonder why we don’t look like that… because if they look like that, why shouldn’t we? It’s always nice to follow celebrities on Instagram, but as you surf through your feed you are constantly seeing airbrushed photos and fake tans and eyelashes. We don’t stop and think how much of this is real… we just know that we want to look like that. Little do we know, we are holding ourselves to impossible standards. Most times, they don’t really look like this, so we shouldn’t either. It is not at all possible to look like these Photoshopped and edited photos in real life. In real life, nobody has perfectly clear skin, pearly white teeth or long, thick lashes. It is all unattainable. What the media never shows us is what the real woman looks like. Let’s be real for a second… at one point or another we all have skin imperfections and our hair doesn’t always look perfect… and I mean all of us, even those celebrities on the front covers.
Only seeing these fake productions in the media contributes to a lot of issues in women, especially young, female teenagers. The younger generations of women are the ones who are probably the most surrounded by Photoshopped and fake images. If these are the types of women that they begin to look up to and they realize that they don’t look like them, they may begin to have body image issues. Having an issue with your body image is especially problematic when you are thinking that you need to look like something that is impossible to look like… like the fake images that we see all over. In the end, self-esteem is negatively impacted because you begin to think negatively about the way that you look. Nobody’s self-esteem should be affected by things that aren’t even real to begin with. So, don’t compare yourself to what you see online or in the magazines, because ninety-nine percent of the time it isn’t real.
Take a look at some of these edited images!
In this one you will notice that her jaw and cheeks are taken in to make her face look slimmer. Her eyebrows are shaped, and eyes are made brighter.
In this one you will notice from the left one to the right one that her waist was made smaller, and her breast made larger and more prominent. Her legs look more toned and her skin is clearly airbrushed. Perhaps the biggest transformation is in the area of her neck and shoulders. Her bone structure in that area stands out way more than in real life.
These are all very common things that are edited in photos found in the media. These are the types of things that our young women are aspiring to look like…
Photos:
http://www.cleancutmedia.com/advertising/france-to-regulate-airbrushed-photoshopping-pictures