Campaign to Ban Airbrushing for Teen Girls’ Mental Health
August 5th, 2009 |
A GoodTherapy.org News Summary
It’s fairly common knowledge, and particularly plain to see with a bit of insight and experience, that the women typically depicted in fashion and beauty magazines have had their pictures significantly altered by digital artists. Steps to improve skin tone, remove any fatty appearances, and cover up blemishes have been a mainstay of such photography for decades. But a group in the UK has decided that this mainstay is a hazard to the mental health of teenage girls. Citing the annual rates of hospitalization for anorexia and bulemia, the group hopes to ban airbrushing from magazines in an effort to present growing girls with more reality about body image, and less unrealistic ideals.
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the airbrishing/editing thing has always bothered me. frankly speaking, I like my women la natural. It’s a turn off when i see a woman over doing her makeup, hair, clothes, breasts.. i mean, I’m all for women being feminine…but not plastic!
I think some of the pictures we see in magazines provide such unrealistic images of what folks look like. Worse, it sets up an ideal that is not really possible. Not sure about banning these but I do think some type of disclosure should be provided.
That’s a cause I would back. The girls don’t see what the models look like without makeup or airbrushing. Their looks are unattainable by any standards because they are not real but try telling a teen that!
Bring on the ban! I have a good friend who was anorexic by 14. She thought she didn’t look like them because she had no self-control over her eating habits, not that the pictures were airbrushed. She didn’t want history to repeat itself with her daughters. Both of them have a very clear grasp of what’s fact and fiction in the photographic world and can spot a Photoshopped image at twenty paces.
For the sake of the children we should all support this. Growing up should be a time of magic. Last I heard calorie counting and developing a negative self-image wasn’t magical. Until we prevent these altered pictures from being cover to cover in teen magazines, we’re doing our kids a very big wrong that is completely avoidable.
I don’t like anything artificial from food to photos. Show this image to every young girl you know. To see the “before” version and understand how far airbrushing can alter an image roll your mouse over this face of a model.
http://homepage.mac.com/gapodaca/digital/bikini/index.html
Thank you for the example themuse. And that’s after she’s already in heavy make up! What an even greater contrast that would have been if she’d been bare faced. Professional digital retouchers do work miracles. That’s the problem.
I fully support that initiative. Boys suffer from anorexia too and are forgotten. The ban should include magazines aimed at under-16s irrespective of their readership’s assumed gender.
Interestingly the June issue of Time magazine ran a feature on new research out of London. The researchers claim there could be a genetic link between anorexia and autism, with both conditions being hereditary. The study suggests what manifests as anorexia in girls more often becomes autism in boys.
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1904999,00.html
Why draw the line at under 16’s? I don’t think the campaign goes far enough to only include teen magazines although that’s the sensible starting point. People are insecure about their looks at all ages, male and female. Good luck to them!
I remember the Dove campaign about showing real women with real bodies in their ads. Fashionistas made fun of it, saying The Campaign for Real Beauty would never succeed. Readers don’t want to see ordinary people on the pages was the argument.
Dove understood how wrong about their readers those editors were and that beauty’s only skin deep. The campaign was a fantastic success, teaching young girls and women about confidence and self-esteem. I think it’s still running.
It is, Sugarlove. Check out their dedicated Campaign for Real Beauty website which also carries free self-esteem tools and workbooks.
http://www.dove.us/#/cfrb/
There’s a report called “Real Girls, Real Pressure: A National Report on the State of Self Esteem” that Dove commissioned in June 2008. The statistics there are a sure sign we don’t need magazines to make girls feel any worse than they already do.
http://content.dove.us/makeadiff/ser_report.html
Editors, please give them real girls. The final decision on what goes into the magazine is in your hands. Encouraging the idolization in teenagers of unrealistically portrayed models is not an honorable career move.
Anorexia is a killer. Children are not unblemished nor immaculate. Their pictures don’t have to be either. Please support the campaign and publish only natural shots. It could be the next Dove.
Let’s be honest here. Is fat what we really want to see? This is not the ideal that we want for our girls, so why not instead of giving them overweight models to look at or anorexic girls to model after, we provide them with images of healthy engaged females who are enjoying life and who they are. There is nothing wrong with that, but I do sometimes think that in the effort to be pc even showing them overweight girls is not necessarily the healthiest image to portray either. We all know the health risks that come along with weighing too little as well as weighing too much. Why can’t we seem to find a happy medium?
As a male I have to wonder why it seems that mainly girls are the ones who go through all of this negativity about themselves. Are we teaching our young men something different than we are the young ladies, because quite frankly I work with a lot of teenage guys and they have self esteem in boatloads while the girls are always down on themselves. Do we really put that much more pressure on the girls to achieve that ideal image than we do the boys or are we just doing a better job of giving the boys the coping skills that they need to make it through adolescence and into adulthood? there are so many factors that could come into play here that it is hard to know where we need to begin making those changes. The one thing that I do see though is that girls are not only hard on themselves but they can be brutal toward one another too. Making sure that we extend kindness to our friends and showing these young girls how to do this too could be a good way to get the ball rolling in the right direction.
“Is fat what we really want to see?” What?? I had to read that twice to believe my eyes.
I don’t see why it’s any more objectionable than thin. What do you think we should do Logan, hide fat people away? Sorry to hear that carrying a few extra pounds offends you so much. It’s attitudes like that that are why airbrushing is so popular.
Logan I don’t understand why you say it’s in an effort to be pc that they would show overweight girls. What’s pc about that? All I see are people supporting that we shouldn’t encourage young girls to kill themselves slowly and giving them tools to build their self esteem. If you’re referring specifically to the Dove campaign you really, really missed the point.
I agree with Logan. A healthy image is what matters. A REAL one, not airbrushed. No pun intended on the happy medium line I guess Logan? ;)
PJ: Small, medium or large I don’t mind. As long as she won’t melt when she stands close to a fire.
I’d be glad to see girls and boys with teenage skin problems on the pages too. It’s obvious from what themuse posted that model didn’t have a flawless complexion. The odd zit or patch of acne would make them more real and help teens who had skin problems not feel so self-conscious. I would support any company’s products that had the guts to use models like that.
Carter you ask a good question. I don’t believe boys have better coping skills. I believe they are indoctrinated in a “can do” mindset from a very early age and girls aren’t. Girls learn a more nurturing role and are not prepared to the same degree for competitiveness or how to handle it. I think that’s why they get bitchy when other girls do better than them. It’s insecurity.
Ever see some celebrities without makeup? Talk about Fright Night LOL. A little bit of powder and a little bit of paint makes a little lady exactly what she ain’t. Airbrushing was taking that to the next level. Seeing isn’t believing.
Wow! This group is doing very awesome things!