The Effects Of False Beauty From Photoshop

It is no secret that today’s society defines beauty as thin, long-legged women with statuesque bodies. Examples are found everywhere just by glancing at the closest magazine ads or by scrolling down the latest fashion article online. Normal, everyday women are being forgotten and tossed aside to make room for the “Top-Model”-like women currently crowding up Hollywood. Media depicts women as an unattainable image. They pressure ladies to buy the products they’re advertising; luring them with false advertisements promising that with it, they too could be perfect. While the media portrays women in a certain way for advertising and marketing benefits, it has caused numerous negatives effects to women’s self-esteems nationwide, it contradicts

Throughout their lives, women of all ages are constantly being bombarded with advertisements convincing them they must meet an ideal of the perfect body image. This is all thanks to companies that share a common goal to influence the mainstream population into believing they need to purchase certain products in order to compare to the impossible standards set by the beauty industry. In Dave Barry’s “Beauty and the Beast” he displays that it is planted in young girls minds that they need to look, dress, feel, and even act a certain way. However, men aren’t as affected by these capitalistic marketing schemes. In short, the media has affected the way women think of themselves.

Self-esteem also plays a role in body perception. The way we view ourselves affects the way we feel about ourselves. Individuals with high self-esteem often have a positive body perception (Wasylkiw, MacKinnon, & MacLellan, 2012). In our society, thin bodies are ideal for women and muscular bodies are considered ideal for men. These ideal body images may be difficult to obtain and therefore men and women may begin to feel negatively about themselves. A study was conducted in 2011 that examined body size perception in students at Pennsylvania State University. Students who did not perceive themselves as having their ideal body image, reported having lower self-esteem and feelings of shame. Females reported that they needed to be thinner while males reported needing to be bigger and stronger. Female students were also reported to have higher discrepancies between their ideal body and their actual body and therefore had lower self-esteem. Negative body perception not only caused lower self-esteem, but also ratings of attractiveness (Gillen & Lefkowitz, 2011). Issues with self-esteem may cause higher rates of mirror gazing because of a greater focus on flaws in body perception.

The argument of The Beauty Myth is that as women have received more eminence, the standard of their personal appearance has also grown. Wolf’s position on the issue is that this type of social control is potentially just as restrictive as the traditional roles of women. The Beauty Myth discusses how society’s viewpoint of beauty is detrimental to women because it causes many emotional and psychological problems to women who strive to become “perfect”. This book is important due to the fact it raises awareness to the issues that many young women are currently facing.

Society has set certain stereotypes to girls and women about what it is considered to be beautiful that girl’s focus more in their appearances than in their internal selves. Every girl deserves to feel beautiful because they all are, but how can girls think that they are beautiful if there is always that constant reminder of what being considered beautiful is. It is often seen on TV various shows where little girls are being judged by the way they walk, turn, how their makeup and hair is done and what they are wearing, and obviously their beauty. Society has set such high standards of what is considered beautiful and girls are being the victims of those standards. Girls now feel that they are not beautiful enough because they do not meet

The images displayed on social media, the Internet, and television display women as perfect beings that must keep up with trends, makeup, fashion, and hair to be relevant. The demand for a woman to always look drop dead gorgeous can be overwhelming can even spike our confidence but for those of us who grew up as tomboys or uninterested in beauty, it can have us give up and become wallflowers.

It’s difficult to envision a world where idealized female imagery is not plastered everywhere, but our present circumstance is a relatively new occurrence. Before the mass media existed, our ideas of beauty were restricted to our own communities. Until the introduction of photography in 1839, people were not exposed to real-life images of faces and bodies. Most people did not even own mirrors. Today, however, we are more obsessed with our appearance than ever before. But the concern about appearance is quite normal and understandable given society’s standards. According to Jane Kilborne, “Every period of history has had its own standards of what is and is not beautiful, and every contemporary society has its own distinctive concept of the

The image of a woman’s body has always been the center of attention to society all over the world. Globally, anyone who thinks of a woman’s ideal body, immediately thinks of a thin body with no cellulite and no imperfections, a small waist and soft skin, between other descriptions that are considered “hot” and “good looking”. Females often feel pressured to attain society’s highest expectations because it is easier to fail them, rather than meet them. The music and other industries, like advertisements constantly portrays an ideal and beautiful body for women, in most cases thin. When women see these images and then look at their own bodies, which are most of the time different from what is portrayed as ideal in society’s eyes, they begin

What does the media tell us about women? It tells us what is “most important” and that’s how we look. They surround us with images of ideal female beauty. We have been learning from such an early age, that we must spend our time to strive to be like the women in these images and to feel ashamed and guilty if we cant live up to these incredibly unrealistic expectations. But failure is inevitable, when the women we are being shown are photo shopped and airbrushed to seem thinner, with faces so flawless that there is not a wrinkle or a line to be seen. This idea of beauty that society is showing us is so edited that it can’t be achieved. Not even the women in these images we are being shown look like this. The media is beginning to dictate our lives, influencing our thoughts, opinions, and actions. Through this use of magazines, advertisements, and social media, we are being shown by society what we need to look like in order to be beautiful. Society challenges women to be strong and independent, by showing us that in order to be seen as the ideal female we have to look like a woman that has been altered with on a computer for hours until she doesn’t even look like

Mass media falsely claims to be an advocate for self-acceptance and the idea that every woman is naturally beautiful, while it simultaneously uses Photoshop to erase all trace of that natural beauty—imagine how much they would Photoshop women if they did not extol real, non-enhanced, beauty! The women in these digitally improved photos look, quite frankly, as real as Barbie and her friends, and few women actually believe that the women in the pictures look that flawless in person. However, these pictures have the power to make any woman, including those in the pictures, feel inadequate because she is not as “attractive” as a Photoshopped image, the power to make a woman detest herself

Advertising uses a lot of different techniques to show the public the perfect female image. Body doubles and computer retouching are two examples of how advertisers are able to “doctor” images. The majority of women we see in magazines, music videos. and movies do not appear in reality, as we perceive them in the media. We may actually believe we are looking at one woman’s body when we are actually looking at sections of three or four women’s bodies, which, when spliced together, shows us the best parts of each women’s body as the final product. Women cannot attain these impossible standards of attractiveness. Young girls learn very quickly that they must spend much time, energy, and money on achieving these standards.

It 's not a mystery that society 's ideals of beauty have a drastic and frightening effect on women. Popular culture frequently tells society, what is supposed to recognize and accept as beauty, and even though beauty is a concept that differs on all cultures and modifies over time, society continues to set great importance on what beautiful means and the significance of achieving it; consequently, most women aspire to achieve beauty, occasionally without measuring the consequences on their emotional or physical being. Unrealistic beauty standards are causing tremendous damage to society, a growing crisis where popular culture conveys the message that external beauty is the most significant characteristic women can have. The approval of prototypes where women are presented as a beautiful object or the winner of a beauty contest by evaluating mostly their physical attractiveness creates a faulty society, causing numerous negative effects; however, some of the most apparent consequences young and adult women encounter by beauty standards, can manifest as body dissatisfaction, eating disorders that put women’s life in danger, professional disadvantage, and economic difficulty.

We are constantly surrounded by images of the “perfect” woman. She is tall, thin and beautiful. She rarely looks older than 25, has a flawless body, and her hair and clothes are always perfect. She is not human. She is often shown in pieces – a stomach, a pair of legs, a beautifully made up eye or mouth. Our culture judges women, and women judge themselves, against this standard. It is forgotten that “beauty pornography”, as Wolf says, focuses on underweight models that are usually 15 to 20 years old. Flaws, wrinkles and other problems are airbrushed out of the picture.

Women have let the idea of looking beautiful take over their self-confidence and life. Healthy Place, an online magazine teaching women about living a healthy life, says that, “today's fashion models weigh twenty-three percent less than the average female, and a young woman between the ages of 18-34 has a seven percent chance of being as slim as a catwalk model and a one percent chance of being as thin as a supermodel.” So why do women push themselves to be excessively thin when these models are anomalies? They do it because the media tells them that this look is the only look that can attract men. Even if a woman is “beautiful” according to the media’s standards, she will always find something about her body that she hates, whether it is her hair or her belly button, no women is completely satisfied. Our society is very accepting of different religions and lifestyles, so why can we not accept different types of beauty as well?

Society has painted a picture that beautiful is the most important thing that a women can be. Smarts, a good personality, and other great traits do not matter if the women is not attractive looking. The media is most responsible for this stereotype. Women in commercials and television shows give girls a false expectation of what they are supposed to look like. The women on these programs have thousands of dollars of make up on and have done countless number of surgeries on themselves to make themselves look “attractive”. Not only does this effect the girl’s self-esteem, it also puts a false image into men’s heads about how women are supposed to look. This puts even more pressure on the women to try to achieve something that is unattainable. Not only are the women in these advertisements unrealistic looking, they are also over-sexualized. Over-sexualized means that these women are being shown as sex figures instead of being actual actors. One of the worst offenders in over-sexualizing women is music videos. Music videos almost always have scantily clad women dancing in a sexual way throughout the duration of song. This coupled with lyrics that are vulgarly demeaning towards women give ladies a false idea of what they have to be in order for a man to like them.