By Emilee Maciel
Western Sun staff writer
It’s said that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. However, it seems that these days beauty is in the eye of the media.
Images of the perfect body are everywhere, from television screens advertising diet pills to billboards offering free consultations for plastic surgery and on magazines displaying which celebrity recently lost the most weight.
Why is it in the media’s hands to subliminally feed us this message that being thin is beautiful? An article posted on the Media Awareness Network’s website states that this message is stemming from the cosmetic and diet industries, which are thriving as people desperately try to obtain the ideal.
As long as people have a body image problem, the market will continue to grow as people keep buying into these industries.
Each year the cosmetic industry pulls in a revenue of $10 billion and the American Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery stated that in 2010 alone they performed about 1,622,290 cosmetic surgical procedures.
Even in today’s troubled economy, BusinessWeek.com estimates that Americans spend $40 million a year on weight-loss programs and products.
The ideal of beauty for women back in ancient Roman and Grecian times meant a thicker and paler body. Fast-forward to the present, where the ideal body is now a size two and just as tan as Snooki.
Wanting to achieve this perfect look isn’t a crime, but sometimes it does come at a price. This type of image building can lead to horrible diseases like anorexia and bulimia.
The North Carolina Department of Mental Health estimates that eight million Americans suffer from an eating disorder. Both men and women stop eating or purge themselves to be skinnier because that’s what society says is beautiful.
I’m not saying that being obese can be beautiful, or that being skinny is wrong. Beauty comes in all shapes and sizes, and if you’re healthy or at least comfortable in your own skin, you are beautiful.
If you do want to shed a couple pounds, make sure you’re doing it for yourself and for the right reasons instead of trying to conform to what society or the media tells you.
