User:Alcorso/sandbox

Cosmetics are a major expenditure for many women, with the cosmetics industry grossing around 7 billion dollars a year, according to a 2008 YWCA report. Cosmetic retailers design advertising to alter women's attitudes toward cosmetics, encouraging them to buy more products. Many advertisers shape this attitude by encouraging women to feel dissatisfied with their appearance. According to sociologist, Jean Kilbourne, adolescents are particularly vulnerable because they are new and inexperienced consumers and are the prime targets of many advertisements. Study after study has proven that repeated exposure to ideal beauty as portrayed by the media causes detrimental psychological effects in children and adolescents ranging from distorted body images and lowered self-esteem to eating disorders and steroid use.

This thin ideal represents less than 5% of the American population leaving 95% of females with a beauty norm that is impossible to meet. Not only is it impossible to meet, but often times the model in the advertisement has been photo manipulated. The flawlessness of advertising woman is, in fact, an illusion created by makeup artists, photographers, and photo re-touchers. Each image is painstakingly worked over: teeth and eyeballs are bleached white; blemishes, wrinkles, and stray hairs are airbrushed away. Media images convey normative information as to what an attractive body looks like that prompts women to evaluate their own body against this normative standard. . According to Kilbourne, the number one wish for girls ages 11 to 17 is to be thinner, and girls as young as five have expressed fears of getting fat. Eighty percent (80%) of 10-year-old girls have dieted, and at any one time, 50% of American women are currently dieting.