The glossy covers of Vogue, Harpers Bazaar, and Elle glare at women from news stands and grocery-line cash registers. The covers are all beautifully edited and promise to give us endless beauty secrets, weight loss tricks, and the newest trends, but perhaps the most intriguing part of these magazines is the Cover Model. The “It” girl. She’s the one whom everyone wants to be. She stands in model-like poses, flawless and glamorous all at once.
Fashion magazines, television, music videos, movies, and all other media types try to promote a certain type of woman as being perfect, and they try to change society’s perception of beauty by doing this. In the media, we don’t see the unglamorous sides to being a woman or anything close to a real woman. Instead, we see Kate Upton doing a photo shoot in collaboration with professional make up artists and countless photographers. Women who don’t fit this image of “perfect” are not beautiful according to these magazines. But ask yourself this, who are they to judge?
What we don’t see is the processes behind creating this image of beauty in media. In addition to heavy amounts of makeup, professional hair styling, outfit coordination by a stylist, and beauty treatments well above the budgets of college students, women in the media often go through extensive measures such as plastic surgery. The media also often chooses to present only women of a certain size to be considered beautiful. All of this plus use of Photo-Shop will undoubtedly create the illusion of perfection.
It is wrong of the media to force this inaccurate portrayal of women as the standard for beauty. It sets the wrong models for women to look up to and now, many women are taking harmful steps in order to conform to this standard of beauty including resorting to eating disorders and plastic surgery. Women also have lower levels of confidence when they compare themselves to such unrealistic models of beauty. It is impossible for women to live up to the standard of beautiful when it can not be achieved naturally.
The media needs to acknowledge and recognize the fact that beauty comes in all shapes and sizes. There is no one size or shape that can be considered “perfect.” Instead of showing such a skewed portrayal of women, the media should show real women with real flaws as being beautiful. Flaws are truly beauty marks and make us who we are; the media needs to embrace this fact and allow young women the freedom to be confident in their bodies. As women, we should not be forced to scrutinize and cover up all our imperfections. We should be able to be taken as beautiful in terms of personality and us as a whole, not just our looks. This is only possible once the media walks away from the superficial artificially created idea of beauty.