Unrealistic Beauty: Advertising and its Affect on Women's Body Image

The stereotypical “beautiful” girl today is incredibly thin.  Magazine ads use toothpick-sized models, which are not even that thin in reality, to sell clothing that is to be worn by the average girl.  Girls then go buy these clothes and when they do not look like the models in the pictures with these clothes on, they develop feelings of inadequacy.  This then leads to the search for the “perfect body”.  When the perfect body does not even exist.  Advertisements use retouching to make the already seemingly perfect girls even more perfect, and just unrealistically beautiful.  The combinations of low self-esteem, feelings of inadequacy, and the possible additions of depression, anxiety, or loneliness, cause serious eating disorders in women today.  The central cause of these disorders is just the overall body image of women and the affect that advertising has on them.