This is perhaps the most meaningful blogpost I have ever written. I knew when I started this whole blog thing that I wanted to do something impactful. I wanted to get out of my small dorm room at my small university and talk about large scale issues. This article is about one that is very important to me: the daunting beauty standards that our society has and continues to perpetuate.

I often find myself fascinated by the sheer perfection that I see in photos on instagram. Perfectly porcelain skin, glistening white teeth, airbrushed legs, contoured cheek bones- the assumption that the goddesses that take over social media just lucked out with this fantastic gene pool is one that I carried for much too long.

It never occurred to me that people could or would edit themselves beyond a filter or brightness to enhance the quality of the photo, to actually change things about their physical appearance. I assume that the combination of my lack of technological proficiency and the utter deceptive nature of extreme photo editing prevented me from exposure to the world of facetune, perfect 365, perfect photo and an assortment of other editing apps in which you can perform what I now refer to as “photo plastic surgery.”

Yes, you read that right- photo plastic surgery. As in, editing your body to make it a different shape or size than it actually is.

Ok, but there’s no way people use these things, right? We know it happens in the magazines, but I was completely unaware of the extent to which is has been made available to do on your own handheld device. With much closer examination, I noticed how heavily edited *most* pictures I was looking at were. My friend Rachel and I even did some screen-shotting, zooming, and extensive examination of certain pictures that came up on our feeds. Mind you, we know what these people look like in real life… and they had edited on makeup, slimmed their faces, edited their bodies.

So I did a little experiment on my own face to see just how much I could really do. WHAT. This is how much I could transform myself to look, well, better, but also completely fake. Don’t get me wrong. I know I look better on the right. But I also know that the person on the right isn’t me and the person on the right isn’t real. I didn’t even know that people did this to themselves all. the. time.

I was stunned. Shocked. Flabbergasted. And mostly hurt.

It’s a little deceptive for sure- now I know why certain people just seem superior in their photogenic abilities,  but it hurt because of what it proves about the shallow, confidence-lacking society we live in.

It isn’t news that society perpetuates unrealistic beauty standards by which young, impressionable women feel the need to latch onto for acceptance, support, and confidence. But somehow, society has encompassed these archaic ideas of beauty into the realm of modern technological ability by allowing people to individually mold their physical bodies into a digital caricature, which is then posted to social media for people to “like” these beautiful images that aren’t REAL. And then people start to compare themselves to beauty that isn’t REAL.

It breaks my heart that we live in a society that continues to perpetuate body image issues, body dysmorphia, and the age old archetype of “the perfect woman.” The fact that this even exists is mind-blowing to me. The fact that people play into it is scary too- but I can’t blame them much. It’s hard to be a girl. It’s hard to be a woman. It’s hard to try to uphold this idea of perfection. After all, that’s what social media is- a platform of acceptance. It’s an innate part of the human condition to want to be accepted- but it doesn’t get better by feeding into the insecurities. It doesn’t get better when you have to morph yourself into a different physical form to gain acceptance.

Can we ever get to a place where all types of beauty are accepted and praised. Please. Let’s stop this.

Keep Smiling,

Jenna