You are Beautiful, inside and out

What can we do to raise self-esteem? Why do we feel a need to cover ourselves up with make-up and the latest trends to feel beautiful?

Helping raise awareness of the negative body image is important. It is important for women to understand that what you see in a magazine shouldn't be the standard you set to achieve. What one person may find attractive, another may not. So why set the bar to something unobtainable? Why not start to accept yourself instead?

Don't compare yourself to a magazine ad, to a model with airbrushed skin and an airbrushed body. Embrace who you are. Beauty is not skin deep, beauty is your intellect, your strength, your heart and your drive. Who are you driven to be?

Confidence is important. A confident woman is an attractive woman. Ask anyone, and I'm sure they would agree.

The Body Project

I recommend to anyone interested in finding out more about body image and the history to pick up "The Body Project" by Joan Jacobs Brumberg. This book goes into the history of acne, body image, menstruation and how these issues have been addressed over the past and present centuries.

The most interesting section to me was the chapter on acne and skin care. Girls you to go to such extremes back in the 1800 and 1900s just to get rid of one pimple. It goes to show that although many of us struggle with acne in today's world, it is much easier to find treatment with all the advances in technology and readily available over-the-counter treatments.

The following is an excerpt from Brumberg's book:
"...as the story of my own mother and grandmother reveals. My mother, Frances Storck, also the daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants, grew up in New Rochelle, a suburb of New York City. In 1929, at age seventeen, she began to travel by train once a week to see Dr. Frank Combes, a well-known dermatologist at Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan.[...]
My grandfather was a busy tailor who catered to New Rochelle's wealthiest families, but the Storcks felt they did not have the means to send a daughter to college. The family nevertheless found resources to invest in Frances's skin. Instead of college tuition, they paid for three months of the most sophisticated dermatology (i.e., Roentgen rays), which, in 1929, was no small matter."

Survey

Please direct your attention to the survey to the right of this page. What has had the biggest impact on your body image. Also, please feel free to leave comments explaining more indepth as to why this was the biggest impact, or any stories you would like to share in regards to how you experience body image.

Dove

What do you think of the new Dove campaign? Do you think this is an effective way to get women to appreciate their bodies and show that these are the real women with real bodies. Or do you think it is a marketing stunt to get people to buy into Dove products. Do these campaigns make us warm up to these products because we find them sympathetic to the everyday woman?

Please visit the following article on Dove and their new campaign...what do you think?
http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=926533781&sid=3&Fmt=3&clientId=3855&RQT=309&VName=PQD

Why we think the way we do...

In today's society many women are influenced on body image through the media. If you start flipping through a fashion magazine you are going to come across rail thin models, with perky breasts, clear skin, and great hair. Page after page is filled with these unobtainable bodies. It's all about the airbrushing and the fasting, but will women stop to think that this isn't reality or will they stop and long to look like that woman in the magazine. What is the difference between the woman who can look through that magazine and still feel confident and the woman who flips through the magazine only to find herself depressed and hating her body when she is done?