Media and the new beauty patterns

by Vanessa Chinen

Magazines, advertisements, TV commercials… Everything seems to impose what we’re supposed to wear, to buy or even how we’re supposed to behave and look. Like it or not, we’re all somehow influenced by media.
Several years ago, people considered larger women the most attractive ones. Nowadays, beauty patterns are completely different from back then. For someone to be beautiful, he or she has to be very, very skinny (in women’s case) or have a very muscular and athletic body (in men’s case). Of course overweight is not a good thing if you care about your health, but some people’s obsession for losing weight is definitely not healthy.
Due to this worship of thinness, diseases like anorexia and bulimia are getting more and more common. The worst thing is that there are even websites that spread the idea that is good to have diseases like these.
Also, as a consequence of these news patterns, people are a lot more concerned about their body image and a lot of gyms have opened lately. Physical exercises are recommended for people to keep a good health, as long as they do it carefully, not only thinking about their body image. Physical exercises in excess and without professional help can cause more damages than benefits in some cases. These beauty patterns that media spreads all over the world can cause a lot of damages to many people. They try to lose as much weight as they can, need to have that new hair cut or a new pair of silicon implants and want to look like that top model who is so skinny that it seems that she has never eaten anything different from lettuce, tofu and chlorophyll juice in her entire life. The ones who can’t reach these patterns are considered ugly (or, at least, not that beautiful). And the ones who can, become slaves of that image of beauty that media imposes. Is up to each one of us to have common sense and tell what is acceptable and healthy from what may cause us any harm.