“An Ideal Beauty is an entity which is admired, or possesses features widely attributed to beauty in a particular culture, or perfection.” 

Media continuously pressure women to fulfill the expectations of everyone. Advertising models and celebrities and posting images of them make women feel pressured into looking the same way on social media and in reality as well. Many companies selling and targeting women with beauty products, saying it will change their appearance to look more like their favorite actresses and models.

Since women control the market more than men, most advertisements are aimed towards women, with the objective to convince them to buy the advertised products. Women are especially tempted to buy beauty products, since history has taught women to focus on their looks and better themselves. Hair dye, fake tan, and other beauty products convince women that they would be more beautiful buying those products and changing the way they look to fit the society's ‘Beauty Standards”. 

Recently, the use of photoshop  has started to become extreme and is creating another level of beauty idols. Photos of models and celebrities that are being posted in the magazines and social media have for long affected the beauty standards of the society. But now, those photos are often manipulated by photoshop or similar software to increase the perfection of the look. Even if women know that what they see is manipulated by photoshop, many of them and especially teenagers suffer from this. Feeling pressured to look like what they see on the media and what has started to be the definition of being beautiful in today's society, has side effects to it. Eating disorder and depression can both be a result of the way how women compare themselves with models and movie stars they see in the media, and like this manipulations of photos with photoshop can be extremely damaging.

Lebanon for example is one of the countries that got affected greatly by beauty perceptions, being the country with one of the most plastic surgeries per capita. About 1 in 4 women in Lebanon have a plastic surgery procedure in their lifetime. Advertisements and media showing the usual ‘beauty standards’ with blonde hair girls, blue eyes and big lips have changed the way people think of what's defined as beautiful. Changing themselves, trying to look like a picture they have seen is pressuring women in this society. Many people who see these images think it is normal to look perfect and that they have to look the same, making them change themselves to look more like what they think is known for being beautiful, while most of the media pictures have had the images edited with photoshop, making it more and more difficult for people to relate those beautiful images to their own reality.

In my opinion, many media have a negative effect especially on teenagers. Not only fashion magazines, but also websites and social media use photos that are edited with photoshop and provide unrealistic ideas on how to be beautiful. People should express who they are and not be afraid to hide it behind an app that changes the way they look. Beauty should not be a requirement of looking a specific way.