Media influence feelings of beauty
Fashion shows and fashion spreads: The media shape our image of the perfect body. One study claims that the common beauty ideal of the thin model could soon be replaced by the average weight average woman.
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Beautiful, slender people meet us daily on TV, on the Internet and in magazines. Especially the advertising formulated our ideal image of the super-thin woman, claims a study of the universities of Durham, Newcastle and Amsterdam. However, if we were to see more women of normal weight, that would positively relativize our picture of the ideal body, the scientists suspect.
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As part of the study, published in early November 2012 in the journal PLoS One, the research team asked 57 female volunteers to rate images of four different types of women. Including extremely underweight women, heavily overweight women, slim catalog models and plus-size models. To rule out that the respective clothing influence on the attractiveness factor, half of the underweight and half of the overweight wore a plain gray body suit.
Media influence beauty ideal
It turned out that women, who were mainly seen pictures of particularly thin models, preferred narrow body shapes. However, subjects who only looked at images of overweight women in conjunction with extreme skinny models tended to be the fuller women - even though they had unattractive gray body suits.
The supposed ideal, which many media regularly keep in mind, apparently influences our picture of a perfect body. This could mean that if normal-weight women are more present on television, in magazines and on the internet than skinny models, this could counteract the usual lean mind and relativize our sense of beauty. For SHAPE Online a perfect body is a healthy body!
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