I found that if you have the boldness to do it, people can be really pleased if you help them out in person with this. Recently I saw two other women waiting to try things on in a lingerie shop, comparing different perceived flaws in their own bodies to a wall-sized pinup photo. I didn’t think their insecurity was any of my business, until one said ‘See, if I had a body like THAT [the photo] everything would be fine.” I could see from retouching classes that it had been altered in a dozen subtle ways, so I told her, and she and her friend spent about 5 minutes asking about different kinds of retouching and when I left told me I’d made them feel much better.

I think it’s important that those of us who can spot this stuff (in my case because I’ve been taught how to do it myself) don’t let the people around us compare themselves to it and think it’s real. It helps break the assumption that everyone else is striving for it too, and makes it feel normal to question it. Sometimes so many things have been altered that we might as well compare ourselves to a pencil drawing.

Absolutely agreed. Personal responsibility can work wonders when it comes to our own body images – we have the choice not to engage when the media sends us these messages, and it’s incredibly empowering to raise our hand to them and say “No thank you. I don’t need this.” – Whether it’s makeup, magazines, or even fragrances which have basically identical marketing strategies as cosmetics.

We can often start off buying these products believing they can make us more beautiful and perhaps thus more liked. While this CAN be true among SOME social groups, one must question which KIND of social group they wish to be involved in, and also what kind of PEOPLE they wish to attract. Yes, I may be able to walk out the door in Prada gowns, (if I could afford them!), L’Oreal makeup and some Versace fragrance and get stares, compliments and even interest from people who want to be around me more. But what kinds of people would those be? All they know of my is my appearance. They don’t know of anything I hold dear to me: hard rock music, literature by the Brontë sisters, keeping fancy goldfish, or my fondness for collecting My Little Ponies. When I think of the kind of people I want to attract, it is definitely NOT people who give a damn about makeup and dresses.

I WANT to attract people who don’t care about fashion. Considering things like this, I feel, is important when considering how we dress, and truly feeling we don’t have to conform to some “attractive norm”, but are not only FREE to be ourselves, but encouraged to be ourselves in favour of attracting who we wish.

Even if we banned photo retouching, beauty products and procedures all together, that is still not going to stop girls from comparing themselves to the naturally gorgeous women walking down the street every day, and watch as the men ogle those women which will trigger them to feel bad about their bodies. That’s where my body insecurities as a teen came from, not from magazines or the TV screen, but from peers who were effortlessly attractive.

We cannot just lay back and demand the beauty industry to change to our liking. It’s never going to happen and even if it did, it certain won’t drastically change the number of eating disorders, suicides, and teen plastic surgeries undergone every day. Each individual person has the power to overcome and ignore the messages being thrown to us from media sources, and that is the only way to gain the self esteem we need to keep going on every day. The sooner we take responsibility over our body image, the better our society will be.