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LIFE'S A BITCH: Mum's the word to stop damage



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Published Date: 10 October 2008
How ironic that the BBC chose Alesha Dixon, the beautiful singer, model and Strictly Come Dancing star, to investigate whether air-brushed images in magazines fuel women's increasing need to seek bodily perfection.
Alesha is pretty much perfect. She looks the way millions of girls would love to. The way many a woman might spend a small fortune on cosmetic surgery to feel as good as.

In Alesha: Look But Don't Touch on Tuesday night, she offered herself up as a covergirl to any magazine who would take her. The catch? She insisted there was to be no digital enhancement whatsoever.

But this was hardly going to be a warts and all shot, was it?

At worst, Alesha might have looked a bit spotty.

While she waited for a magazine to come forward, Alesha pondered on what our obsession with perfection was doing to young girls.

She went to her god-daughter's playscheme.

"I don't like being brown," said the beautiful little girl who couldn't have been more than seven.

She had skin the colour of latte, flowing curls and eyes like pools of drinking chocolate.

Her blonde classmate admitted she didn't like her own hair.

Two examples of how little girls now fret needlessly about their looks at far too young an age.

Alesha looked like she wanted to sweep them up, press their perfect, ungilded little cheeks to her own cosmetic-plastered face and reassure them that they were beautiful.

But all I wanted to do was to slap the mother of their playmate – the one who proclaimed a size 14 was way too big and that the best size for a woman-to-be was a size eight, because that's what her mummy is.

Therein lay a huge clue as to where heaps of the pressure to be beautiful, slim and perfect actually comes from.

On top of the magazine pile, on a pedestal way above the Hollyoaks cast and the dinky pop stars, there's a girl's biggest celebrity idol of all... Her mum.

If mum is constantly on a diet, and is fretting about every inch as she squeezes into her teenage-sized skinny jeans and moaning about her wrinkles and her big nose, then her daughter is far more likely to think she should look on her own reflection with such negativity.

Just as bad are the mothers who, instead of striving to boost their daughters' confidence, pander to their vanities and insecurities.

As well as those little girls, Alesha met a teenager whose parents had bought her a £7,500 boob job for her birthday.

Alesha sat in on the op, watched the skin being sliced, the young flesh being prised apart, the bags of silicon being inserted.

And all to give a silly, impressionable young girl a shape she considered sexier.

It is utterly wrong, in my opinion, for surgeons to be carrying out boob jobs on teenage girls if there is nothing seriously wrong with their bodies.

And the parents who are willing to pay for the butchering of their child's body... they should be spending their money on getting their heads examined.

What do you think? Add your comments below.

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The full article contains 578 words and appears in Sheffield Star newspaper.
Page 1 of 1

  • Last Updated: 09 October 2008 2:36 PM
  • Source: Sheffield Star
  • Location: Sheffield
 
 

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