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he so called ideal criteria of being thin and beautiful. They feel their social group will reject them on basis of them being slightly fat or what is normal. There is this unpleasant bullying that comes into the picture where one is experiencing teasing from their counterparts on the basis of how they look like, i.e. fat. The fatter you are, the more unpleasant and disconnected you are from being a part of the popular group of girls.

Heubeck (n.d) takes the example of American girls who are facing the burden of being model like thin which seems like a real aspiration for them, however this starts off at a very young age which is extremely disappointing. There are countless bombardments of TV adverts featuring models with perfect lips, body, hair-style and the entire attractive physical appearance that seems a must achieve for these young minds. Unfortunately these young girls seems to consider these celebrities as role models even if these role models have a cruel bad reputation. According to Renee Hobbs, EdD, Associate Professor of Communications at the Temple Univesity she found in her research the exposure an average teen gets to media is nearly 180 minutes with only 10 minutes of interaction with their parents on a daily basis. This view is shared by Elissa Gittes, MD- a pediatrician at the adolescent medicine at the Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh, she believes young girls are obsessed with imitating the ideal image they watch in media, they end up taking harsh and desperate measures. There has been an increase in the number of young girls who comment on how unhappy they are with their body and are working obsessively hard to change this image of themselves.

As per the research conducted by Nancy Signorielli from the Kaiser Foundation, Nancy discovered one in every three articles in leading teen girl magazines also consisted a key focus on physical appearance, where majority of the advertisements (reported at 50%) used an appeal to beauty to market and sell their products. Furthermore, the TV adverts and commercials which were targeted at female viewers depicted frequently were regularly watched by young girls where beauty was seen as the central theme for product appeal. When examining the figures on eating disorders, it points how 1,000 women died annually as a result of anorexia nervosa. Nearly, five percent of adult women and adolescent along with one percent of men were suffering from binge eating disorder, anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa. When comparing the figures on men to women suffering from depression and eating disorders, it clearly demonstrates it is young girls who are most affected and suffer from depression and eating disorders (Media’s effect on body image, n.d)

It can be concluded from the findings within this essay popular media is certainly responsible for influencing young girls in a negative way by making them self-conscious about looking perfect. There has been an artificial imagery of icons created, flashed and swamped in different mediums of media that has caught the eye and attention of young minds who take it in a positive manner. The fact more and more young girls are driven towards looking like their ‘role models’ they take up unhealthy options to look physically perfect even if it means it is a life threatening one. The issue of self-image is an umbrella which entails issues of mental and physical depression along with eating-disorders that have mult