Look at the posters on your bedroom wall. Brad Pitt has got great skin, hasn’t he? Penelope Cruz has got a fantastic figure, right? The truth is, no they haven’t – at least not all the time. Film stars, pop stars and models have bad days, too, just like everyone else. They get spots and blemishes every now and then and they put on a few extra pounds from time to time, too. So how come we never see those photos? Well, to start with, advertisers think that we don’t want to see pictures of people looking less than perfect. What’s more, the stars themselves pay their publicists lots of money to make sure their pictures are perfect every time. This means that every photo we see on the cover of a glossy magazine has been retouched. Stomachs are flatter, legs are longer, lips are fuller and waists are slimmer. Although we know this, we still can’t help comparing ourselves to these unreal images and feeling unhappy about the way we look. What we should do is say, ‘Wow! This photo is really phoney!” and laugh at the fake beauty we see in media images or better still ignore them altogether. No one looks perfect 100% of the time, and we shouldn’t let the media cause how we feel about ourselves.
