Body Image Essay

In the magazine industry, finding the ‘perfect’ image of someone is becoming more common. This new marketing strategy entices the audience to buy and read their magazine but at what cost? Every magazine issue released, is sending out a message to it’s audience that is demoralising the body image of themselves. We are seeing more and more manipulated images in the media, making our perception of true reality distorted. The representation it has on women demoralises their body image as they constantly try to fit into what society believes as the perfect body. Visual persuasion is effective with readers as seeing someone live a better life allures the reader into buying the product. How can we believe what we see anymore? Overall altering our

The effect this has is that when we see more of these images, our view on body image is demoralised which forces us to believe that they are better looking than us the readers. Images are altered using photoshop. Magazine publishers do this to gain an audience as a visually pleasing image of someone will entice them to buy and read the magazine. What the audience sees in the media makes them aspire to be like what they see. As the standard for a ‘beautiful body’ goes up, so too does the visual look of our bodies in the media. Henry Farid, a Dartmouth professor of computer science says that “The more and more we use this editing, the higher and higher the bar goes. They’re creating things that are physically impossible,” The bar has gone so high, that the human body in the media looks unnatural and unappealing to some The distorted image of ‘average’ in the media has forced the audience to try and become ‘average’ and as the media changes and the meaning of ‘average’ becomes higher, the audience can’t keep up and thus makes them feel like they are not beautiful which demoralises their own body image. The audience compares to the body image of themselves to that in the media. As magazine publishers aim to design the body image of celebrities to be always better than the rest, the audience is constantly trying to keep up the demands of what their body image should