Rising Stars Blog

Editorial: Photoshop

In today's society, everything is digital. It's out there, and sometimes, there's no telling what's real and what's fake. This presents a new slew of problems for upcoming generations, particularly on body image. Photoshop is a pandemic run rampant. Body image issues are on the rise, not only in girls and women but in boys and men too. In order to solve this problem, magazines should start putting labels on their covers or inside covers, warning the readers of unrealistic ideals.

According to HerCampus.com, In a survey done of over 2000 women, 15% could not tell what images were photoshopped, almost 50% said they struggled with body confidence, 24% said they only felt confident when not in public spaces, and 33% of the surveyed said they were trying to achieve a body type that was impossible. This response of disheartening truths of women today is caused by the over prevalent flow of photoshopped images. These women who try and achieve the impossible are related to the ever-rising plastic surgery statistics in the US. The American Society of Plastic Surgeons Statistic Report from 2016 shows that the number of plastic surgeries has risen 4% in the last year and a 37% increase since the year 2000. All of the media that surround us from a young age through adulthood greatly affect our self-confidence and can leave lasting impressions on our own identities indefinitely." What this is trying to say is that half of women and girls aren't self-confident and dissatisfied with how they look. But the statistic we want to address is this "15% could not tell what images were photoshopped." This may not seem to be much, but suppose there are 4 billion women in the entire world. Now, this isn't an unrealistic number, as there is 7-8 billion people on the planet at any given time, and the ratios tend to run pretty evenly. 15% of 4 billion is roughly six hundred million. That's more than the population of the United States, Britain, Italy, and Canada combined. Seems like a bit more now, doesn't it? But say we scale it back to the women in the US. There were 166.7 million women in the USA in 2019. 15% of that is 25,005,000. Twenty-five Million. How many women in your life don't know that the models that they're looking at, wishing they could be like, even starving themselves for are a reality that doesn't exist? Your mother? Sister? Friends? And women and teens aren't the only group that this affects. In recent years, studies have started to focus on how men are affected by media advertisements. Several of these studies have found that men of all ages become more self-conscious and even develop eating disorders as a direct effect of media advertisement. Sixteen percent of high school boys have an eating disorder and many report that they are more afraid of gaining weight than getting cancer or other terminal illness. While females are the most directly and heavily affected, men are affected as well, and the point still stands with both genders.