I’m at work right now, reading through Newsweek.com and I came across this interesting article: “The Backlash Against Magazine Airbrushing.” The author sounds a lot like myself at first, talking about reading Seventeen and YM as a preteen, and calling them her Bibles. Anyway, the story is about airbrushing and whether or not magazines should do it, and is it a good message to send teens today.
I personally think that the more natural one looks the better. People Magazine just had their 100 Most Beautiful People issue and they had a spread of celebs who posed with no make-up and I thought most looked better without make-up. Teenage girls today need to see that it’s okay to have a little blemish here, or maybe have a some circles under their eyes or a freckle on their nose. I think it’s so incredibly important to feel good about yourself and today’s magazines make it so hard for girls to see that.
Anyway, what are your thoughts on this issue? Do you think fashion and teen magazines are helping or hurting today’s teenage girl population?
1 response so far ↓
1 Allie Funk // Jun 2, 2008 at 6:14 pm
Great post, Kate! I think that extreme airbrushing in popular magazines can have intense adverse effects on young women. One editor was quoted in the article as saying that airbrushed images are just that- images, not photos. That’s a pretty poor defense, as the celebrities on magazine covers come to be in said “images” through the process of PHOTOshoots. It’s unethical to advertise girls’ role models through altered photographs, therefore presenting an unattainable standard of beauty to the young women who read these magazines. The perfection projected in these pictures isn’t real and only serves to make girls feel insufficient for not looking like that.
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