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Body Image

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What is beauty? Is it having a skinny body, a blemish free face, and long blonde hair? For some girls it is. Beauty is a main concern for many girls, especially as they are growing up and going through adolescents. They admire women in magazines and on television, dreaming to be just like them. Unfortunately, what they do not realize is that no one has the perfect smile, perfect skin, or perfect hair. The media puts forth an image of beauty that is unattainable. They do this by showing unhealthy stick-thin girls with “flaw-less” attributes. In the sick world of marketing, the companies that produce an item to sell, such as make up, depend on the insecurities of females. The companies use thin girls with a perfect complexion and a killer smile to flaunt around with the product they are trying to sell. When girls see this, they think to themselves, “Oh I wish I looked like that.” or “This is how I should look, the way I look right now isn’t right.” Because we only display thin girls in our media, girls feel as if that is how they should be. The media negatively influences girls’ perception of body image, which can cause eating disorders and low self-esteem. There have been plenty of studies linked to the negative impacts of body image caused by the media. Here is an example of one study found on thebodyproject.com, “In 1999, Anne Becker and Rebecca Burwell of the Harvard Eating Disorders Center found that media exposure dramatically increased the incidence of eating disorders in the island nation of Fiji. The researchers chose to study Fiji both before and after the introduction of Western television programming to the nation. Before Western TV arrived, most Fijians subscribed to traditional ideas of beauty: larger bodies, bodies that would be classified as obese in the West, were considered the most attractive. Large bodies were seen as evidence of a person’s

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