Jessica+Medina+Annual+Project

Teen girls these days are becoming more and more uncomfortable with their bodies. More girls are getting unhealthy and insecure about themselves. Part of the reason because of this are magazines. Teen magazines have affected teenage girls. To these girls, the people on these magazines look perfect. Then they wonder why they can't look like that and develop problems with their bodies. Teen magazines affect teenage girls because they get eating disorders like anorexia, they are growing up too fast and acting like adults at a young age, and also a lot of these photos are photo-shopped and that's what a lot of girls don't know.

When teen girls feel uncomfortable with their bodies or feel insecure, they might develop eating disorders. For example, they might develop anorexia. Anorexia is a disorder that happens when a person has an obsessive desire to lose weight by refusing to eat. The obsession of losing weight is so powerful that these girls go to extreme measures to look the way they want to look. [|Anorexia is the 3rd most common chronic illness in adolescences.] That's how severe it is. [|Also, 1 in 200 American girls suffer from anorexia]. It might not seem like too many, but it is.[| In general, people from the age of 8 can be diagnosed]. Even when kids are as young as 8, they can develop these eating disorders and develop insecurities about their bodies.

Teen magazines are affecting teen girls also by making them grow up too fast. If you look at one of these magazines, some of them say, "Tips on Make-up," or "How To Attract The Hottest Boy In Town And How To Keep Him." They try to give tips about everything. From make-up, to relationships, to what to wear and how to do your hair. Girls are starting to wear make-up at age 12, and some even at 10. Parents are getting scared that their daughters are trying to act too much like adults at such a young age. [|One in three leading teen magazines have a focus on appearance.] There's too much pressure on girls to trying to look right. Because of this, parents see a change in their child that they don't want to see.

These magazines make teen girls feel insecure about their bodies. But, the thing that these girls don't know is that a lot of these pictures are photo-shopped. The people that they see on the magazines don't look exactly like that. Actually, models in these magazines are 25% less than their ideal weight. They look skinnier in their pictures than what they really look like in real life. When girls see them and see how skinny they look and how pretty they look, they wonder why they can't look like that and why they have to look the way they do while these other girls look perfect. Also, these girls on magazines are airbrushed. So, if they have any scar, blemish or zit, people can't see it.[| A girl named Julia Bluhm which was in 8th grade, sent a petition to Seventeen Magazine for them to issue a cover that's not photo-shopped at least once a week.] She said that she used to see her friends suffer because they're insecure about their bodies and didn't want to see other girls going through the same thing.

Girls everyday are going through problems with their bodies. What they see and read in magazines affect them. They make girls get eating disorders like anorexia, they make them grow up too fast and act like adults, and the majority of the photos are photo-shopped and a lot of these girls don't know that. Instead of magazines publishing some of the things they write about, they should send out a more positive message for girls to read.