Have you ever looked through a magazine or watched a commercial and thought to yourself, “I wish I could look like her?”
The perception of beauty has changed over the years. “The average person sees up to eight thousand advertisements each and every day,” according to Helium.com. Nowadays, men and women are trying to look like their favorite celebrities or favorite athletes from the way they dress to the weight they must be in order to look beautiful in the eyes of their peers.
From movies to television shows, to billboards and magazines, to even toys such as Barbie dolls, pop culture can influence the way we think about beauty. Most little girls ask for Barbie dolls when they are young so that they can play dress up and style them the way they want the doll to look like. Barbie dolls are seen as the perfect doll. From her hair to her body to the way she looks and dresses, she is the allusion of perfection.
Television has also been a one of the biggest influences in the way people perceive beauty because people watch TV shows and movies every day. As we all get older, the realization of being beautiful is not just make-up, weight and shoes, but also sex appeal. Everyone knows the sex sells and people get more drawn in when they see a woman or man is wearing less clothing. Shows such as The Vampire Diaries, Pretty Little Liars, Glee and so many more shows have some of the hottest actors and actresses and people want to look and dress like them.
Magazines and billboards are two other big influences that seem to change our views about beauty. They constantly try to sell those who read the magazines such as People, Elle, Vogue, Seventeen, etc., into buying products they swear will make us more beautiful. They advertise numerous products from make-up to making yourself look younger to having the right color hair to even having the perfect body.
Technology has come such a long way from when it first started. There are so many different tricks people can do to pictures to make them look real. A program that has become very popular and used by many magazines, photo ads, modeling companies and much more, is Adobe Photoshop. It is a program used to edit pictures with state-of-the-art creative editing tools.
Photoshop is such an impressive program that they can retouch people to look differently from what they actually look like in person. Dove, a skin care line, made a commercial named the “Evolution commercial.” It shows the evolution of a model with not so good skin and hair getting her make-up and hair done and showing her photo shoot and then displaying all her retouching through Photoshop. She looks completely different from what she actually looks like in order to sell the product.
To me, in today’s society, everyone feels the need that they have to have the perfect body, the perfect hair and the perfect look. What’s wrong with just being you? I’m not going to deny that I don’t have the perfect body and I don’t look as pretty as some other girls but what’s the fun in that if everyone looks the same. We should learn to appreciate our beauty and embrace them. Just like everyone else, there are days I look in the mirror and say to myself “Damn, I look so ugly today! Why can’t I have a body like Kim Kardashian or be as pretty as Selena Gomez?”
The way the media has corrupted the views of beauty in America is appalling. It makes people feel as if they are not as beautiful as others and turns people to do drastic alternatives such as cosmetic surgery. We should appreciate the way we look because there is no one else that looks like you.
