Beauty Demands

With recent discussions about potential harms of Instagram , particularly for teenagers, we revisit this 2019 post highlighting the need for relevant adults to become more digitally literate.  It is well established that young people make extensive use of social media. In the UK, 83% of 12-15 year olds have a smartphone, 99% go online for over 20 hours per week, and 69% have a social media profile . It is certainly apparent that social media is a key resource in the lives of contemporary young people and is a central space for the development of identities and relationships, as well as emotional regulation, self-expression, learning and much more. At the same time, many adults find young people’s uses of social media concerning. The dominant narratives that surround young people and social media tend to be associated with risk, and the potential for negative impacts, in areas including body image and body dissatisfaction. The key challenge is that the contemporary digital ...

With October being Breast Cancer Awareness month, we revisit this great post exploring the impact of breast cancer treatment on women's body image.  The month of October is a time when charities, individuals, brands and businesses in the UK raise awareness of diagnosis and treatment of breast cancer. Breast cancer is the most common cancer affecting women in the UK, and in any one month around 5000 women will be diagnosed with the disease (Breast Cancer Care, 2018). Surgery, chemotherapy, radiotherapy and hormone therapy are used to treat women affected, and cancer survival has doubled in the last 40 years (Cancer Research UK, 2018).   Procedures and therapies impact on women’s bodies physically and emotionally as they experience the changes caused by the disease and treatments.   Women might find it difficult to come to terms with a body that differs from idealised media images, and previous work on women’s body image and well-being after cancer treatment has focuss...

Earlier this year, Norway passed a law requiring that social media influencers who edit their appearance on promotional posts must add a disclaimer label declaring this editing. In this excellent post from 2018, Jasmine Fardouly explores whether such disclaimers are likely to be effective: (For more recent research with similar findings, see Livingston, Holland & Fardouly's 2020 article in Body Image journal) Whether you are reading a magazine, scrolling through social media, or just walking past shop fronts or advertisements, it is likely that you will come across glamorous images of thin women living a seemingly perfect lifestyle. These images generally promote a very narrow beauty ideal that is unattainable for most women. These images are also often edited, using appearance-enhancing lighting and photo editing filters, apps, and programs. Thus, the beauty ideal being promoted in these images is not real or achievable. Decades of research suggests that looking at these...

As the UK moves slowly out of lockdown, outdoor sports should restart in two weeks, so we revisit this interesting research from 2019 on body image in women who engage in sport and exercise.   Women who take part in sport and exercise tend to have more positive body image than other women (e.g. Hausenblas & Fallon, 2006). Positive body image in women who exercise has been linked with a number of factors including relatively greater focus on body performance rather than aesthetics, the fact that exercised bodies tend to be closer to the mainstream cultural ideal in terms of body fat levels and muscle tone, and psychosocial benefits of sport, such as autonomy and competence, that have been linked to more positive body image (e.g. Petrie & Greenleaf, 2012). Although women who take part in sport and exercise tend to be more positive about their bodies than other women, this does not mean that they do not have body image concerns, and body image concerns have been reported i...

  On 19 th February 2021, the #EverydayLookism campaign hosted the first of its live-streamed panel discussions . In this event – Body Image As A Public Health Issue – Professor Heather Widdows , Dr Antonis Kousoulis (The Mental Health Foundation) and Dr Luke Evans MP discussed why we need to take body image seriously, and reframe it as a matter of public health. The panellists began by explaining why body image is important enough to be a public health concern. They argued that a focus on body image can have significant mental health implications (such as anxiety and depression) and can also have wider effects on physical health and everyday life (for example, preventing young people speaking up in class or engaging in physical exercise).  For example, Heather cited the 2016 Girls’ Attitude Survey by Girlguiding that showed that 53% of girls between 7-10 years old think that they have to be ‘perfect’ most or some of the time, and this number rises to 84% of girls betw...

Body image concerns can develop early in life. Girls as young as five are dissatisfied with their appearance, are afraid of becoming fat, and express a desire to be thinner (Davison, Markey, & Birch, 2000; Lowes & Tiggemann, 2003) . Sadly, these concerns often increase with age and are associated with harmful weight-loss behaviours, such as dieting and excessive exercise (Paxton et al., 1991; Stice & Shaw, 2002) . The parent-child relationship is a primary source of influence on development during childhood. For girls, mothers are important role models of eating behaviours and appearance-related attitudes. While it may seem normal and harmless for mothers to make negative comments about their own appearance or to engage in weight-loss strategies, their daughters may vicariously learn these attitudes and behaviours. Girls may model their mother’s behaviours and learn to place great value on the importance of being thin. Research has found links between mothers’ self...

The idea of nature acting as “tonic” for urban society, with the potential to promote physical health and well-being has a long history [1]. In the early modern period, for example, greenspaces – such as the Place Royal (now Vosges) in Paris and the royal parks of Greenwich, St. James, Hyde, and Richmond in London – were opened to the public as a way of providing social and physical rejuvenation for town-dwellers. By the mid-nineteenth century, as many of Europe’s cities became overcrowded – in London, it was estimated that one in every four tenement flats was overcrowded in 1848 – open spaces and greenery became all-purpose medicines to cure a range of illnesses [2]. In the early part of the twentieth century, these ideas were taken up by the garden city movement, who viewed nature as the most direct way of reducing the health problems associated with urban overcrowding. Writing in Garden Cities of Tomorrow , Ebenezer Howard launched his vision for a series of ideal towns [3]: sel...