When my niece was fifteen years old she came to live with us for a year because she was struggling at home with following the house rules. She was getting into a lot of trouble and failing all of her courses. She was a mess. Naturally I was not completely prepared for her total preoccupation with her looks, and I really felt that she had some kind of disorder about how much she wanted to change her looks. I can remember when we were looking through a magazine and she commented that she wished that she was as beautiful and the models in the magazine, when I told her that the pictures were retouched and the models had been airbrushed to make their skin look flawless she immediately said that she wanted me to buy her one of the airbrush tanning systems that are on the market today. I told her she was crazy to think that I would buy her something like that and that she is/was a beautiful young woman just the way she is/was. And that was true. The fashion magazines do our young women a serious injustice, giving them the impression that they need to be as flawless as the pictures in the magazine. It’s actually very sad, really.
Tags: house, magazine, models, niece, trouble