Earlier this year, a young girl named Julia Bluhm started an online petition demanding that Seventeen magazine include at least one un-retouched image per issue.
Here’s what lots of girls don’t know. Those “pretty women” that we see in magazines are fake. They’re often photoshopped, air-brushed, edited to look thinner, and to appear like they have perfect skin. A girl you see in a magazine probably looks a lot different in real life. As part of SPARK Movement, a girl-fueled, national activist movement, I’ve been fighting to stop magazines, toy companies, and other big businesses from creating products, photo spreads and ads that hurt girls’ and break our self-esteem. With SPARK, I’ve learned that we have the power to fight back.
In the spirit of her protest, SPARK and other groups have launched The Keep It Real Challenge urging all beauty magazines to adopt this approach toward showcasing real beauty in their glossy pages. The online challenge includes three days of action. On the first day, participants will tweet the editors of their favorite beauty magazines to show their support for dumping Photoshop.
Next, they'll write blogs from their own perspectives about why these unrealistic standards of beauty need to go. On the third and last day, supporters are encouraged to upload photos to Instagram displaying what real beauty means to them. This activity bridges young girls and activists around the country who are tired of the false representation of beauty in the media and advertising and what it has done to us. If you think that magazines should make a better effort to "keep it real," we hope you'll participate as well. We certainly will be! It's time to tell the fashion industry and advertisers that there is something much better than Photoshop "perfection"... real beauty and real women. Download the #KeepItReal Toolkit to get started.
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