Beauty, Social Media, and Body Image.

With technology advancing ceaselessly and newer apps surfacing online, social media has a first-hand effect on beauty. Today, it is one of the most crucial factors contributing to the mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual health of an individual. With the media incessantly depicting ideal beauty and body image comparisons, the decisions of men and women’s beauty choices are affected globally.

Social media play a critical role in people's self-image by informing and reflecting on what people consider to be beautiful or attractive. One way in which they do so is by commonly using very thin and attractive models in print and other media. Often termed the 'thin ideal', they communicate the way people believe they should look in order to be attractive and desirable to others. These ideals have had a major impact on the perceptual, affective, cognitive, and behavioral aspects of body image by encouraging lean body patterns and delivering anti-obesity messages. It could be that the mass media affect their audience not only by reinforcing beauty ideals ('thin is beautiful') or by eliciting immediate changes in terms of how people perceive their own appearance, but also by controlling perceived norms. Studies demonstrate that perceptions of what is considered to be average, influence how individuals feel about their own bodies. In other words, one of the reasons why media-portrayed thin-ideal images can be harmful is because they skew what people think of as being 'normal' or typical in a given population. Studies show that women generally want their bodies to appear a certain way depending on (1) what they think other people find attractive and (2) what they think the average person looks like. The pictures on social media sites are idealized and fancied, due to digital modifications and hence setting high expectations from individuals in society. Unrealistic images of femininity, beauty, success, and body shape promoted through social media images are associated with the development of eating disorders and body dissatisfaction disorders. It is high time we talk about this dark side of social media and help stop this unrecognized catastrophe.

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