beauty-in-the-news

Western Eyes

Mon, 05 Dec 2011 19:23:34 +0100

To learn more about this plastic surgery phenomenon, go to the link below to watch a very informative documentary on it

http://www.nfb.ca/film/western-eyes

Who Needs a Fountain of Youth?

Mon, 05 Dec 2011 02:26:45 +0100

AARP’S November 2011 Issue featured men and women in their 50s who have embraced their outward appearance and inner-self, and here’s why:

Stella Moreno, 50

Anthony, New Mexico
Speech pathologist

"Two weeks after I had my son, I turned 41. Two years later, we adopted our daughter from China, and I stopped coloring my hair. The first time I saw the gray, I thought, 'Oh, this is really different.' But my husband encouraged me every step of the way. I would get stopped with my little ones, and people would say, 'Are those your grandkids?' But simplicity has become very important to me. I just want to be healthy for my kids and set a good example. I don't want to be fixated on outside appearance." — Photo by Ben Baker

Bonnie Salvo, 53

Chicago, Illinois
School Social Worker

"My philosophy is that beauty comes from within. In my field, I've worked with a lot of people who are gorgeous on the outside but their self-image is so poor. I have a good self-image — I'm a good person and respected in my field, so all that makes me feel good. I'm feeling okay about turning 53. I don't know if I'd ever get [plastic] surgery. Maybe 10 years from now. I'm not against it, but right now it's not a priority." — Photo by Ben Baker

Darliene Howell, 57

Las Vegas, Nevada
Small-business Owner

"People think that if you're big, you don't have discipline. I definitely have discipline. I once went on a medically supervised liquid fast for a whole year. I'm a size 24. My family has always been this way; I can't change it unless I have surgery. I've become something of a fat activist. I eat a healthy diet and move and don't let things hold me up because I may appear to someone else an unacceptable. I believe I'm a beautiful person." — Photo by Ben Baker

http://www.aarp.org/entertainment/fashion-beauty/info-11-2011/gallery-faces-of-50.420-bonnie-salvo.jpg.html

Altered Sense of Beauty

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 01:37:45 +0100

Digitally altered photos and body image: Look at the retouching

November 29, 2011|By Eryn Brown, Los Angeles Times / for the Booster Shots blog

Digitally-altered photographs in magazines and beyond -- a pimple fuzzed out here, a crooked nose reshaped there -- can be nice to look at. But as photo retouching has become more widespread, scientists worry that such idealized images have negative effects too, making people less satisfied with their own, less-than-perfect looks.
When the website jezebel.com publicized apparent alterations to a photograph of the singer Faith Hill from a 2007 Redbook cover, readers recoiled. This summer, the American Medical Assn. called on advertising associations to develop guidelines to discourage changing photographs in a way that might "promote unrealistic expectations of appropriate body image."

How to implement such guidelines? One possibility: Simply tell viewers how much an image has been altered.

Computer scientists at Dartmouth University have come up with a "perceptually meaningful" way to quantify how much a photo has been retouched -- a rating that they say could "inform consumers of how much a photo has strayed from reality." Eric Kee and Hany Farid analyzed 468 original and retouched photos collected from online sources. They used computer algorithms to analyze alterations to the photos, developing eight "summary statistics" to describe how much an image had been altered. These described geometric modifications -- as in the thinning of a waist or improvements in posture -- as well as photometric changes, such as smoothing filters that improve skin tone and texture.

Kee and Farid combined the summary statistics to rate how much photos had been retouched. To verify that their ratings reflected the impressions retouching made on viewers, they compared their ratings to human subjects' observed estimates of how much the photos had been altered. They found that the measurements correlated well.

The results were published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academies of Science. Kee and Farid's work was funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation, as well as gifts from Microsoft and Adobe Systems, the latter the company that created Photoshop.

Curves

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 01:37:18 +0100

We're all real women ... what do men or size have to do with it?

By: Clementine Ford

Yesterday, Mia Freedman's website Mama Mia featured an interview with noted harridan and all round brassy broad Catherine Deveny. Deveny had read one-too-many articles fretting about body image, and she wanted to "stage a coup on dissatisfaction" as the website put it.

Beneath the headline "I'm 80kg, size 16 and I love my body", Deveny spoke candidly about her frustration with a world that continues to tell women they aren't good enough, and that their happiness lies just another 5kg away. She implied that the advertising industry is in the business of keeping women hungry, and that women whose lives are governed by this pressure are never going to be as happy as the women who have decided to live their lives, their way.

Over 400 comments were posted, many of them positive and thankful for Deveny's perspective. Love her or hate her (and there are few familiar with her work who could honestly claim to be indifferent), the sight of a confident, size 16 Deveny resplendent in her bathing suit was tough to ignore – there goes a woman who will not be told she's worthless.

Unfortunately, the comments were derailed somewhat by a few people insisting that, because she'd included a throwaway line about men being more attracted to slightly overweight women as opposed to slightly underweight, what Deveny had actually done was issue a tirade against thin women and their innate awfulness.

"Skinny bashing" is a phrase that's become popular whenever articles about body diversity are published, and it's certainly not a myth. I've read many tiresome comment threads in which "real women" are hailed as superior, sexier, better in bed, more attractive, more interesting, smarter (which is simply illogical as an argument), funnier, fitter etc etc etc. The final checkmate is issued with a flourish: "Men prefer women with curves", as if the very presence of male desire solves the problem. Excuse my ignorance, but isn't our need for that validation part of the problem in the first place?

Making a man happy is not the same as making yourself happy, not least because fashions change, yet it's so often given kudos in this debate. But 30 years ago, men were quite happy making sexy time with a post-pubescent, hairy vagina. Now, both men and women have been trained to think that what's natural is ugly and unclean and even monstrous, and we respond accordingly through painful waxing, plucking, shaping and, in extreme(ly sad) cases, mutilating surgery.

To me, it seems perfectly obvious that the real enemy is the benign permission we give to society to own women's bodies. We have been allowing culture to tell us for so long what our worth is that we barely even blink anymore.

Consider the game change that's sprung upon us every so often just to keep us on our toes. Advertising dictates to us the ideal body shape according to the fancies of the day. Even though extraordinarily few women will ever be able to achieve it, they'll focus more time and energy on trying than they will on other, more interesting things.

And just when we think we know what our unattainable goal is, what it is that we lack and therefore need to lament, the rules are changed again. Suddenly, Keira Knightley is too thin and Christina Hendricks is crowned our next Ideal Woman. Better yet, it's offered as a gift to us – a reward for all that damning self hatred we've endured up until now. Relax ladies! Hendricks is a "real woman"! She's got "curves"! Men love curves! Men love real women! LET THEM EAT CAKE!

Did this exchange of one particular body type for another result in a happier, more inclusive place for women? No, because women have been encouraged by mass media to be suspicious of each other. We can't conceive of a world in which more than one type of woman has social agency and power, because that world doesn't exist for us. When Real Women suddenly became the Belles du Jour, some of them, so used to being marginalised and desexualised by society, suddenly and perhaps understandably revelled in that tag. Instead of recognising that it was the same assassin in a different mask, they acted as the marginalized often do – they sought to demonise the standard that had been held over them and that they believed they might be free of.

But regardless of power, real or imaginary, there was no empathy with the fact that by virtue of their gender alone, "skinny bitches" were just as subject to self loathing as their larger counterparts. There was (and still is) an assumption that a size 8 woman couldn't possibly know what it's like to feel that intense scrutiny of a body you perceive to be "unacceptable". But for every size 16 woman who thinks that about a size 8, there's a size 24 woman thinking that about the size 16. As Deveny says, "There are people out there who if they had my body [would] think they were too fat and others who would be rapt and think they were skinny. It's all a matter of perspective."

The fact is, despite endless body image campaigns (often run by magazines in the business of making money and selling advertising space) no liberation has occurred at all. If anything, women are more marginalised, more fearful about their value than ever before, and the marketing monolith that dominates western society is laughing all the way to the bank. They have found a way to further pit women against each other; it's a Battle Royale between the Curves and the Curves Not that is designed for no other reason than to distract women from liberation by forcing them to oscillate between two extreme ideals.

And make no mistake about it, though one may have more junk in the trunk than the other, ideals they are. Because as a 5 foot 10 woman with small breasts, wide hips and strong shoulders, I have just as little chance – if not less – of looking like Christina Hendricks than I do of whittling myself down to Knightley's diminutive frame. Yet I don't think either one of these women is more or less "real" than me.

When Deveny posed in her bathing suit for Mama Mia, she wasn't, as so many similar twee You Go Girl campaigns had done before her, asking for people to love her. Were her comments regarding men's sexual appetites ill thought out? Yes, I think they were.

But in posing in her bathers, Deveny wasn't begging her audience to see that size 16 women are also worthy of being objectified and validated. Rather, she was demonstrating that no amount of dictatorial manipulation was going to make her feel like she had anything to beg for. Wouldn't it be nice if we could all work towards that level of personal liberation, rather than getting bogged down in petulant fights about who has it worst, and how victimized other women’s experiences make us feel? WE are not each other's enemies, but the longer we behave that way, the easier it is to go on making ourselves feel inadequate.

Perhaps we could all borrow a page from Deveny, and assert for ourselves what it is we want to be desired for. Large or small, there goes a woman who has allowed herself the flexibility to define her identity as she sees fit. She views her body as small child would, and plays in it accordingly: with wonder, merriment and endless satisfaction.

As someone who's spent years poking and prodding her body and far too many hours worrying about the potentially offensive mass of her thighs, that seems like a nice place to be.

http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/3708434.html