The Portrayal of Ideal Beauty both in the Media and in the Fashion Industry and How These Together Lead to Harmful Consequences Such as Eating Disorders

Abstract

In today’s world, women are frequently exposed to the message that “slim is beautiful” in diverse platforms such as women’s magazines, advertisements, soap operas and on social media which often present women in ideal beauty standards. Seeing these images, which represent the ideal beauty over and over again in the media, make ordinary women to compare their body proportions with them and have upsetting emotions when they don’t meet these standards, which are expected. Nevertheless, most of the time ordinary women are unaware of the fact that the media usually applies photo shop filters to the beautiful women images before conveying them and they also disregard the fact that some of the women who represent the ideal beauty have had some kind of plastic surgery. Thus, the media, which create a fantasy world with the ideal beauty, make ordinary women to feel envy towards this illusionary representation and lead them to take action by applying strict diet programs to feel light. However, young adolescent girls who are in a vulnerable age period are more easily affected by these images and feel discontent about their own bodies. The over-exaggerated slim women images often cause disorders in young adolescent girls’ eating habits and sometimes lead to fatal illnesses such as anorexia and bulimia, as a result. Since they are living in a period of their lives in which peer acceptance is highly significant, young adolescent girls who want to look beautiful, start strict diets or they seldom eat during the day. Furthermore, they feel the stress of how they will lose weight in a short amount of time and they slowly become anorexia by controlling their appetite. The aim of this paper is to discuss how the media images of ideal beauty lead young adolescent girls to suffer from eating disorders by presenting a literature review.