Flipping through a magazine with friends used to be fun.
As kids, we would read interviews with the celebrities that we admired from the big or small screen. We’d read our horoscopes, gasping with amazement when it was “so totally right!”, memorize the ten tips for perfect hair as if they were the answer key to an algebra exam, and eagerly tear out the Justin Timberlake poster that was included in the back.
Magazines still include all of these fun features – though the Justin Timberlake pictures have been replaced by Justin Bieber (not a fair trade if you ask me) – but they now have some not-so-agreeable prints inside as well.
Ads, ads, and more ads pop up with every page flip, vowing that this face wash will clear acne in hours, or that wearing these jeans will immediately bring thousands of rose holding suitors to your door step.
But it isn’t exactly what the advertisements are promoting that is despicable, it’s how they’re doing it.
In this day and age, it is virtually impossible to effectively endorse a product without the help of a celebrity. Almost every other big name brand promotes itself with an even bigger name celebrity.
But just because we see Beyoncé holding a can of Pepsi, doesn’t mean it’s actually her. She could simply be another innocent victim of the infamous photoshop, that magical software that can erase the worst cases of red eye, but also eliminate any blemish or flaw from a person to the point that they are no longer recognizable.
In the past few years, photos of celebrities before and after the use of photoshop have surfaced, and the amount of differences between the pictures were astronomical.
Skin was made to look clearer:
Waists were made to look slimmer:
And in the case of famous philanthropist and TV icon Oprah Winfrey, her head was photoshopped onto a completely different body.
Of course it isn’t only magazines printing these types of advertisements, but the point isn’t who is producing them, it’s who is seeing them and how it is effecting them.
CBS News reports that the average person sees as many as 5,000 advertisements everyday. Seeing billboard ads, ads on the sides of buses and buildings, and even ads on sidewalks have become a normal occurrence. But that doesn’t mean that manipulating the models in ads to look like Barbie and Ken dolls should be a run of the mill incident as well.
The more photos that people see of models with flawless skin, rock hard abs, and little body fat, the more they will think of these images as ideal. This mindset could lead to unhealthy habits in order to make the reflection in the mirror meet the media’s idea of “beauty.”
But the reality is nobody, not even the models themselves, look like that.
When looking at these types of advertisements, it is important to remember that every single human being has flaws.
It is even more important not to kind from these “flaws.” After all, they are what make you…you! No one has the same amount of adorable freckles as you on their nose, nobody’s hair curls quite like yours when it’s humid outside, and let’s face it, that thing you can do with your thumb where it bends really far back is totally AWESOME. So embrace what makes you different. The world deserves to meet an awesome person like you!