Fashion and beauty icon Lauren Hutton knows how to play to her strengths. (Mark Boster / Los Angeles…)
You know it's tough out there when fashion and beauty executives think that even a model's body isn't good enough to sell clothes or that a celebrity's natural face isn't up to par, even with makeup.
The website Jezebel reported in early December that Swedish retailing giant H&M featured images on its website of lingerie shown on "completely virtual" computer-generated bodies with real models' heads superimposed on top. Meanwhile the British Advertising Standards Authority banned two makeup ads in 2011 featuring Christy Turlington and Julia Roberts because they thought too much airbrushing made the ads misleading, and CoverGirl pulled a mascara ad after a U.S. watchdog agency questioned product claims and post-production enhancement of the photo.
An H&M official defended his company's practice, saying "It's not about ideals or to show off a perfect body … we are doing this to show off the garments."
But faced with an onslaught of digitally enhanced or photo-shopped images, many girls and women find it challenging not to compare and despair. In a currently airing public service announcement produced by the Alliance for Women in Media and the Dove Self-Esteem campaign, broadcaster Lisa Ling cites Dove research that found only 4% of women around the world think they're beautiful.
Even celebrities lauded for their beauty — such as Jane Fonda and Megan Fox — have admitted to insecurities about their looks. "Glee's" Leah Michele says she was told she'd never make it because of her nose, and some stars have acknowledged eating disorders. "I get a very interesting perspective because I work with the most beautiful women in the world who don't always view themselves as the most beautiful women in the world," says celebrity makeup artist Sam Fine, the creative makeup director for Fashion Fair Cosmetics who's also been a spokesman for Revlon and CoverGirl, worked on myriad magazine covers and done make-up for renowned beauties such as Iman and Vanessa Williams.
Fine's solution is to use makeup to bring attention to the person's favorite feature. "If you want to bring attention from your smaller lips to your bigger eyes, then that means a lash and a beautiful brow … you can also de-emphasize areas with contour," he says, adding that in many ways there's a growing diversity in the beauty industry. "Don't compare yourself to someone else's standard of beauty," Fine says. "Realize that your eyes aren't Iman's eyes, but we can bring out your eyes, your beauty."
But sometimes makeup isn't enough. A change in thinking is called for.
"It's very normal for people to be unhappy with their appearance," psychologist Sabine Wilhelm says.
Wilhelm is an expert on what happens when this dissatisfaction is taken to an extreme, when people have such raging negativity about their looks that it "really interferes with having a good life." As an example she cites "someone who says, 'I'm just too ugly to go out today because my skin broke out.'"
About 2% of the population has what's called Body Dysmorphic Disorder (BDD), she says, in which minor imperfections are perceived as major and cause stress out of proportion to the reality. Wilhelm knows this territory well. She is director of both the obsessive compulsive and related disorders program and the cognitive-behavior therapy program at Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School, where she is an associate professor of psychology, and founder of the hospital's BDD clinic and research unit. She wrote a book about the issue, "Feeling Good About the Way You Look: A Program for Overcoming Body Image Problems."
Her techniques for working with BDD patients can be translated into advice for others who are trying to feel more confident about their looks.
Acknowledge that negative thoughts may not be reality: Consider this example: A person may spend hours per day thinking about a scar that, in fact, no one else notices. This is a disconnect between the person's body image and actual appearance.
"Very often patients with body image concerns engage in a lot of mind reading. They automatically assume that other people are reacting negatively to them even though they have no evidence for that whatsoever," Wilhelm says. Think everyone looking at you is thinking how big your nose is? "Examine how helpful, accurate or valid your thinking is," Wilhelm says. "Ask, 'Is there any other thing that supermarket clerk might have been thinking when he smiled at me?' Well yeah, he may have just been being a friendly guy.... The world doesn't revolve around your nose. That particular approach is called 'cognitive restructuring' — learning to step back from your thoughts and evaluate them more critically."
