Female Teens and Magazines

As females grow from children, to being teenagers, to adulthood, we feel the need to learn and discover things about the world that pique our curiosity. This often involves how to be accepted, ways to manage careers, studies and living, and how to be content with ourselves. Often though, we find that in crucial stages of this growth from a child to a woman, we lack the confidence to ask people face to face. This is where the almighty magazine comes in. Ever since the 1940's when Seventeen Magazine came out, teen magazines have exploded in popularity of magazine genre.
As teen magazine popularity and markets have grown, so have the development of the media's control into what we read. The primary focuses of Teen Magazines are topics such as fashion, beauty, celebrity gossip, boys, and advice. However, the ways these products are advertised are very stereotypical.
Ads for flawless skin in teen magazines often have a model who is slightly older than the normal age that teens get pimples, and even so, this model is photoshopped to unrealistic degrees. In fact, even after the model has been airbrushed and given defined features, their features are further distorted to impossible proportions that supposedly are used as a representation of beauty.

The woman on the left has been photographed, then photoshopped to the point of exaggeration on the right. In magazines, people may or may not be as extremely photoshopped as this image shows us, there is absolutely no way the audience would know, but this image does illustrate the point that people CAN be changed to the point where these physical features are incredibly unrealistic. 

Imagine flipping through a magazine and seeing an image of the woman on the right paired with an advertisement for a skin care product e.g. moisturizer. The model looks beautiful and has flawless skin, no blemishes, wrinkles, nothing. We know she has been chosen to sell this product because of her beauty, so she is obviously a demonstration of what being beautiful is. And even though we know that the moisturizer may not work in a way that gives us skin as great as hers, we can still read this image as one to aim to be like in order to be classified as 'beautiful'. But the horrid truth is that SHE DOES NOT EXIST. Us poor, unsuspecting readers won't know this though. For all we know she has been given some light natural make-up, and been shot in front of a beige background. That's it. So now all the connotations of beauty and flawlessness we have associated with her image are no longer amongst the realms of reality.

So now that we have bought into this false reality, we believe that buying the product paired with it will somehow relate to the perfection we see before us. Furthermore, once the product is purchased and used, the consumer can only be disappointed when they find it does not have the effect they wished it would. But because we trust so much in the advertisment, in the words that say "Smooth skin you will love!", we buy more of the same or similar beauty products until we are satisfied. But satisfaction in our selves cannot be achieved solely by physically changing our selves or conforming to the ideal image of beauty, it strays from our natural selves and our subconicous knowledge of this even though we continue to move WITH the media's reperesntation of beauty, is actually quite scary.