Today SPARK went to Seventeen Magazine headquarters to deliver over 24,000 signatures asking Seventeen to start running at least one un-retouched photo spread per issue. (Since this morning, the petition has gotten up to 32,500 and rapidly growing!) Excuse me while I clutch this photo to my chest and sob with joy at how amazing our group of young activists is. Julia, the girl who started the petition (second from the right in that killer ballet stance) is only 14! We’re so proud of her and what she’s started—including what looks like is going to be a fantastic ongoing conversation with Seventeen about how to support and represent girls!

Seventeen Magazine: Give Girls Images of Real Girls!

Girls want to be accepted, appreciated, and liked. And when they don’t fit the criteria, some girls try to “fix” themselves. This can lead to eating disorders, dieting, depression, and low self esteem.

I’m in a ballet class with a bunch of high-school girls. On a daily basis I hear comments like: “It’s a fat day,” and “I ate well today, but I still feel fat.” Ballet dancers do get a lot of flack about their bodies, but it’s not just ballet dancers who feel the pressure to be “pretty”. It’s everyone. To girls today, the word “pretty” means skinny and blemish-free. Why is that, when so few girls actually fit into such a narrow category? It’s because the media tells us that “pretty” girls are impossibly thin with perfect skin.

Here’s what lots of girls don’t know. Those “pretty women” that we see in magazines are fake.They’re often photoshopped, air-brushed, edited to look thinner, and to appear like they have perfect skin. A girl you see in a magazine probably looks a lot different in real life.

That’s why I’m asking Seventeen Magazine to commit to printing one unaltered — real — photo spread per month. I want to see regular girls that look like me in a magazine that’s supposed to be for me.

For the sake of all the struggling girls all over America, who read Seventeen and think these fake images are what they should be, I’m stepping up. I know how hurtful these photoshopped images can be. I’m a teenage girl, and I don’t like what I see. None of us do. Will you join us by signing this petition and asking Seventeen to take a stand as well and commit to one unaltered photo spread a month?

H&M is taking Photoshop to a whole ‘nother level

If H&M wanted to give consumers a virtual template for putting clothes on, why create one identical and unrealistically proportioned model? Wouldn’t it have been a better idea to make (or, I don’t know, hire) a group of models with diverse body shapes and sizes to give girls a real idea of how their clothes will fit?

One argument in favor of the virtually created models seems to be that they are no different than store mannequins and “it’s not that big of a deal.” Except for the fact that they are completely different from store mannequins. Store mannequins are plastic, often headless and don’t resemble real human people. No one is going to confuse the body of a mannequin with a living person.

These pictures are different, and that difference is insidious. The bodies of these models look like real, airbrushed women, which means the implicit message is that real women and girls can and should strive to look like them. Few girls are going to aspire to look like a store mannequin. Plenty of girls and women want to be models, and draw inspiration from pictures of models found in magazines and online. The virtual nature of these bodies is disguised, making them seem more attainable, even though they’re not.

Sign our petition demanding that H&M either end this practice or expand it to include customizable body types—a tool that they USED to have and that’s easily attainable through this technology. 

H&M puts real model heads on fake bodies. via Jezebel:

The bodies of most of the models H&M features on its website are computer-generated and “completely virtual,” the company has admitted. H&M designs a body that can better display clothes made for humans than humans can, then digitally pastes on the heads of real women in post-production. For now — in the future, even models’ faces won’t be considered perfect enough for online fast fashion, and we’ll buy all of our clothing from cyborgs. (This news sort of explains this.) But man, isn’t looking at the four identical bodies with different heads so uncanny? Duly noted that H&M made one of the fake bodies black. You can’t say that the fictional, Photoshopped, mismatched-head future of catalog modeling isn’t racially diverse. 

eta that literally no one will see: we’ve started a petition on Change.org asking H&M to either end this practice or expand it to include customizable body types—a tool they USED to have and that’s easily attainable through this technology. 

From SPARK blogger Crystal Ogar, on this ad that’s recently been banned in England for being overly photoshopped and misleading:

Girls see over 400 advertisements per day telling them how they should look. How can someone–especially a young person–not be affected by this? Having these ads being removed and discussed is progress in itself. It’s great to know that groups like the Advertising Standards Authority are out there and paying attention and taking action on behalf of us all.