Cellulite, Rimples and Dimples: A Beautiful Reality Check
8It’s everywhere in real life and absolutely nowhere in TV, movies or magazines. It’s unrelated to health, yet constantly depicted as a sure sign of lazy slobbiness. The vast majority of women have it, but it gets depicted as shocking headline news in media …
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Holiday Survival Guide: Beauty Redefined Style
From body snarking to food comas and girly gift-giving, this is the go-to guide for all of your holiday body image woes! You know the scene. Family gathering. Aunts, uncles, cousins, distant family friends you haven’t seen in ages. All eyes on you as …
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You’re Not Pretty or Ugly Enough to Talk Body Image. Do It Anyway.
After several years of studying body image and writing/speaking about it publicly, the same brick wall loves to pop up and stifle any productive conversation about what we do: Our looks. Lexie and I will never be pretty enough or thin enough or ugly …
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Modest is Hottest? The Revealing Truth
Women and girls are more than just bodies. But you wouldn’t know that if you looked to media, or even sometimes well-meaning religious rhetoric, for the truth about females. And you wouldn’t know that if you listened to the way so many of us discuss …
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Curvy is the New Skinny, Thanks to Photoshop Phoniness
The latest trend in image alteration might surprise a few people who are familiar with the power and pervasiveness of the thin ideal. Known as “reverse retouching,” this new trend has editors now adding curves and inches in specific areas of women’s bodies to create …
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Attention Utah: Come See Us in Action!
After nearly four years of speaking engagements hosted by schools, churches and organizations across the country, we are excited to finally host our own fundraising and speaking event right here on our home turf in Salt Lake City! Whether you’ve attended one of our presentations …
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Discuss: Where do you draw the line? In beauty, what enhances and what oppresses?
One of the most important and popular issues Lexie and I write and speak about is the idea of “physically photoshopping ourselves out of reality” by changing our appearances to fit profit-driven beauty ideals. This is particularly an issue as women get older, since …
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Get Injections or Get Lost: Media’s Options for Women of a Certain Age
If you lived in a high-tech cave and everything you knew about humans came from mainstream media, you’d be shocked to find out a couple facts: 1) Female humans do not die or crawl into their own caves to disappear at age 40. 2) …
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Breaking News: Seventeen Wants You to Stop Obsessing About Your Appearance!
After about three months of some fantastic activism spearheaded by 14-year-old Julia Bluhm, a SPARKteam member, and a huge response from body image activists worldwide asking Seventeen Magazine to Keep it Real by quitting the excessive Photoshopping it (and every other magazine) is guilty of, it’s …
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Photoshop Phoniness: Hall of Shame
Photoshopping, digital alteration, image manipulation, blah blah blah. Everyone talks about the fact that so many images of women are “perfected” with the help of technology, but do we really understand how serious this issue is? Like exactly HOW MUCH these photos are manipulated …
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No Prince Charming Can Conquer Your Body Image Battle
When it comes to how you feel about your body, you’re not a damsel in distress. Yes, you might be a damsel and your body image might be in distress, but no dashing prince can rescue you from this one. No matter how strong …
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Are YOU Beauty Redefined?
So are you? That depends. Are you beautiful? Yep, more than you know. Do you see the need for society’s ideas of “beauty” to be redefined? I sure hope so. If you can answer yes to both these questions — or if you even …
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TV Boosts Self-Esteem!…If you’re white and male.
Brand new research shows TV has a direct negative influence on girls’ and black boys’ self-esteem and a positive effect on white boys’. While we applaud media that promotes positive self-image for any group, we’re not so pumped (and not so shocked) about the …
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Why “Fitspiration” Isn’t so Inspirational
If you are on Facebook, Pinterest, or Twitter, you have seen fitness inspiration images just in time for “bikini season” to motivate you to “get fit” – we call them “fitspiration.” They are almost always images of parts of women without heads or faces. …
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Vogue Mom Shows Us How NOT to Fight Childhood Obesity
The teaser on the cover for what’s being called the “worst Vogue article of all time” is unbelievably misleading: “A Mom Fights Childhood Obesity at Home.” The truth is, if the article’s author, Dara-Lynn Weiss, mother of 7-year-old Bea, was genuinely trying to “fight …
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