Body image 

Body image is how you think and feel about yourself and is a component of self-esteem. One of the most important influences on body dissatisfaction in adolescent girls is how appearance focused their friends are. Parents and personality traits can also influence a persons vulnerability. One of the other main influences is social media as it causes huge exposure to the whole idea of body image. 

65% of girls say increasing pressures from advertising and media to reach an unrealistic standard of beauty is the key force in driving their appearance anxiety. Meanwhile, 56% of all women recognise the impact of an “always on” social media culture in driving the pressure for perfection and negative body image.

 It is normal for teenage girls to be using taking photos of  themselves and their friends. When they get to the age when they have their own phone and taking photos happens often they are suddenly going to be exposed to so many more images of themselves whether they have taken the images or not. And so there are so many more opportunities to objectify yourself and be critical, especially when compared with the celebrities they will also be seeing on social media. Imagine your friend taking a picture of you as you are pulling a silly face or tucking into breakfast and you compare that with a recent highly photo shopped image of your favourite celebrity. There can be no comparison but that does not stop teenagers feeling inadequate.
 
In today’s dazzling world of social media teenagers are often faced with an online audience and in the worst case often rated by them. Instagram and snapchat particularly focus on body image and these allow teenagers to earn approval of their looks and compare themselves with others. What social media has done is allow everyone to enter the online beauty competition where anyone can airbrush themselves with the touch of a finger. This includes covering up spots, whitening their teeth and making their body appear increasingly slimmer, prettier and hotter. It is very difficult for a teenager to not associate how many likes they get for a photo with how confident they feel about their body. However, this also says something about society as it is worrying that the focus is all on how you look.
 
If you are thinking about your daughter’s phone another thing she will do is following her favourite celebrities. This may include Kim Kardashians, the social media queen, who has over 100m followers, Kendall Jenner with 79.9m followers, Kylie Jenner with 95.6m followers and many more models. An example of how important image is for celebrities is that when Kim Kardashian posted this photo she lost 100,000 followers because this picture showed, like so many other women with two children, she did have cellulite. In fact, some of the online comments where really vile. So if a celebrity gets this much backlash from one photo how do the rest of us feel like we can compete with them. But this what so many of our daughters are doing and it has a rather large impact on their self- esteem.
 
Alongside social media, the rest of media and internet focus on a culture of thinness. Thin equals attractive in many people’s eyes. An example of this is the Duchess of Cambridge. When put under the spotlight the media focused on her image so heavily that she rapidly lost weight. Mainly after she had her baby but this weight lost was not natural as it was due to weight loss tablets. Nowadays, so many models and celebrities lose all their baby weight in under 3 weeks giving society the unrealistic idea that it is normal for this to happen and unacceptable if it does not. This also raises an issue of dieting and whether diets that are promoted by celebrities are actually beneficial for our health. 
 

By Tanishya Kapila