When we open a fashion magazine, walk on the street or watch televisions, we can always see the images of slim models or advertising about building a slender body. The thin-ideal is popular in the social media of most countries and mass media touches every one with its strong and invisible influence. In mass media, including the elements such as advertising, images and articles in televisions and magazines, the thin-ideal seems to be an ordinary thing. However, the distorted thin-ideal images from the social media exaggerate the importance of thinness and have a negative effect on women, causing them to have reduced self-esteem and have weight lose actions which may lead to health problems.
The exposure to thin-ideal body images may cause
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According to Conlin and Bissell's (2014) study of the thin-ideal in magazines, both of the beauty/fashion and health/fitness magazines contain a lot of thinness beliefs and focus on appearance rather than health. The mass media tends to emphasize the importance of thinness. In my study conducted a survey which involved 46 young female participants, 54.3% of them reported they have over weight whereas actually 50% have normal weight but think they are overweight. At the meantime, 70% of the women who is underweight stated they have normal or even over weight. The result implied that most women cannot evaluate their body appropriately and their desired weight is lower than healthy weight. Moreover, when asked to score the effect of the exposure of thin-ideal images or advertising in mass media on building people views to evaluate a suitable figure, 78.8% of people score equal or more than 3 (5 is the highest score and means strongest relationship) which means that most of them agree with that mass media have effect on building their value of figure. This suggest that mass media probably misled women into desiring excess