In watching a show called America's Next Top Model, the plus sized candidate to be a model was a size five in pants. Seeing such things tells women that if they are anywhere above that, then that must mean that they are obese. At least that is how many women end up feeling. These feelings of being overweight also follow women in the industry. Look at the winners of most pageants some 30 years ago, and compare them to the women who win the pageants of today. You will find that the women of today are taller and that they weigh less than the women of the past.
Another way that the advertising industry further perpetuates their ideal image is what they do to their magazine pictures. Women believe that the image that they see of actresses and artists in magazines is what they really what that person looks like. In reality though, after the photo shot, computer specialists will go in and airbrush any skin imperfections, fix the coloring in the picture to make it better and alter other small details. The worst thing that these specialists will do is go in and take the image of the person and stretch the image lengthwise up to 20% and compress its width by 10%. These things may seem relatively small, but when you take an already skinny person and make these changes, the results are relatively big. .
All of the images that women are bombarded with teach women not to be happy with what they have and to always be looking for way to "improve" or "fix" themselves. Continually seeing such images leads to feelings of inadequacy and displeasure, if not part of the woman's life, for her whole life. This is greatly damaging, especially to young adolescent girls, for during that period, they are the most impressionable. Advertisers know this fact and focus a great deal of their attention on them, not caring that they could be greatly damaging the woman's self esteem. Having low self-esteem of their body image can teach women that they are not important or valued for who they are, how smart they are or what they think, but rather that they are important for what they look like.
