Inhuman Fashion

Both men and women are heavily affected by the media, which distorts body image more and more every day. The following video, showing the transformation of an average woman into a gorgeous billboard star, was made by the Dove Beauty Campaign. This video is very popular, but for those who haven’t seen it yet, here it is:

Everyone knows that people in magazines and other images are usually altered and airbrushed, but seeing the entire process makes it a harsh reality. This video is the kind of thing I used to shake my head at, disappointed with the way that young girls everywhere were being influenced to achieve an impossible beauty standard. But something worse has already trickled down into the many facets of the beauty industry.

The airbrushed-but-still-human look is a wave of the past. The models replacing the photoshopped ones don’t even exist. That’s right; the two women in the picture below are completely computer generated, with features hand picked by fashion tycoons. If you look closely, the bodies of the two women are strikingly alike. How can any real woman possibly look so perfect? The fact is, they cant, and the spokesperson of H&M (the company who created the models below) agrees.

“H&M…cannot find someone with both body and face that can sell their bikinis.”
-Helle Vaagland

Click image to view source article.

The sad thing is, millions of people will see these images and buy into the messages they convey. The mission of the Dove Beauty Campaign is to remind society what human beings are supposed to look like. If companies continue to create impossible standards, we may be headed into the same sinkhole as the world in Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies.

Next time you compare yourself to a picture in a magazine or a person on TV, remember that God didn’t grace that person with perfection; a computer did.