![health [Balancing the Scales] The Messages Advertisers Are Sending](http://blissfullydomestic.com/wp-content/uploads/scale1.jpg "scale")
I’m really getting tired of hearing stories like the one I read last week about extreme photo retouching in the name of selling more, whether it be magazines or clothing. They infuriate me. Here I am, a healthy woman struggling to be happy no matter what size clothes I’m wearing, and magazines and advertisers are basically telling me that I’m not “my best self” or worthy of their products because I can’t fit into a size 4.
Looks Matter, But Which Ones?
I understand that fashion models (or celebrity cover models) are chosen for their looks, but why has skinny become the only look that matters? What about being beautifully voluptuous? What about having gorgeous skin and long legs? What about being strong and muscular? Why aren’t all body types celebrated? I’ve known beautiful women of all shapes and sizes, skin colors and heights. Where are those women on the covers of mainstream magazines and in ads for popular products and clothing lines?
Model Filippa Hamilton is only the most recent in a long line of models being ousted for not fitting a completely unrealistic body standard—one that seems possible only for a lucky few with super metabolisms or, for the rest of us, through starvation and photo-retouching. Hamilton was let go, according to a spokesperson for Ralph Lauren, “as a result of her inability to meet the obligations under her contract with us.” While they won’t specify that the obligations were weight-related, I think the creation of that emaciated image sends quite the message. The ad in question only ran briefly, and only in Japan, but it points to a long-standing trend among advertisers and publications in the US.
Whose Best Self Are We Talking About?
This standard also reared its ugly head a few months ago, when SELF Magazine featured a severely retouched cover photo of Kelly Clarkson. While Clarkson was quoted in the magazine as feeling completely comfortable with her weight and unaffected by what others might think or say about it, SELF editor-in-chief Lucy Danziger felt it was necessary to make Kelly look “her personal best” on the cover, shaving off inches of Kelly’s body. My question to Ms. Danziger is: If “Kelly is the picture of confidence” that you say she is, if she is happy with her body and her weight as it is, then why do you get to decide what “her personal best” looks like? And I don’t just ask this of Ms. Danziger, but of all editors and advertisers who are retouching photos to the extreme in the name of “selling more”.
I think what angers me most is that this impossibly tough standard of beauty is the one that most of us are convinced we need to judge ourselves and one another by. I look in the mirror and on most days I’m happy with my 5’3” size 14 body. I’d like to be stronger, fitter and, in turn, thinner. But all-in-all I’m healthy. So why some days do I look at myself and think terrible things? Maybe because the cover of that magazine I just saw reminded me I should be able to drop 2 sizes in 30 days. Or because that model (and that one and that one and that one) won’t stop smiling at me from their size 2 frames.
Ami writes about her attempts to stay healthy, live a local and green life and write that Great American Novel (or something like it) at Writing: My Life.
(photo courtesy of http://www.sxc.hu)
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Hear hear! You said it, Ami!
I am going to come back tomorrow and catch up here on your posts . . . !
PS Ironically, my author photo is "touched up" a bit! I look all smoothed out…a little too smoooooth to my liking *laugh* But I understand what the publishers were trying to do….. But I can't imagine anyone shaving pounds off of me or making my big nose smaller or my full cheeks thinner -ugh! Anyway, bookmarking your site to come back….
Hi, Kat! Thanks for stopping by. I totally understand retouching to get rid of blemishes, fix stray hairs, etc. That's minor, in my opinion. It's the extreme stuff that I find problematic. Sure, not every picture makes me look my best, but I'm not going to go around retouching them to make myself look thinner. I just choose the more flattering pictures to share. Why can't advertisers and magazines do that? What's wrong with showing someone on a cover or in an ad that has some curves to her, whose waist isn't cinched perfectly, whose hips are round and full? Have we really been so brainwashed as to think that if we do this, buy that, wear those, we'll look as thin and gorgeous as that unrealistic goddess on the cover?
I know — !! remembe when Jamie Lee Curtis let photographers take photos of "her real body" and put them in the magazine? I think it was More….
Yes! Now that's a role model to look up to. It was in More…and I'd like to see more famous people putting their "real selves" out there!
Me too!
And stop with the botox already – eyewww! it makes people look strange…