Real Girls Making a REAL Difference

The photoshop epidemic is under attack once again and it's the readers of magazines like Seventeen and Teen Vogue that are taking action.

Photoshopping has become an epedemic in magazines and other digital media. As girls read these magazines, they long to look like "the girls in the magazines." Well not anymore!

A group of teen girls have teamed up with SPARK a Movement, which is a movement "to demand an end to the sexualization of women and girls in media," to show magazines and other media outlets that readers want to see REAL girls in the pages of magazines, with real body issues, no photoshopping or digital enhancements. 

 “I want teen girls to be shown how they are in magazines so that girls in real life won’t have to feel bad about their bodies when they shouldn’t,” member Britney Franco, 13, said in an interview. 

Seventeen Magazine petition

With the crusades of SPARK and the teen members voices, Seventeen Magazine's editor-in-chief, Ann Shoket, recently agreed to stop digitally altering models in any spreads of the teen mag. With the recent victory, the organization moved on to the fashion power house, Teen Vogue. SPARK created a petition to ask Teen Vogue to publicly state they will no longer digitally alter the face or body of any models who appear in the magazine. If you want to sign the petition and have your voice heard, check out Change.org for more information. 

Yesterday, the ambitious teens staged a mock fashion show outside of Conde Nast headquarters in Times Square. They wanted to demonstrate what real girls look like, how girls are affected by photoshopping and what readers want to see in the pages of these magazines.

“We’re really trying to do the runway show to show what we want to see in these fashion magazines and it starts with us, the reader... Being a young woman of color and dealing with body issues and having naturally curly hair, I’ve always struggled finding a role model in these magazines.” -Carina Cruz, 16 years-old, SPARK member

While the movement might not have had as much of a positive influence on the teen fashion mag, with the meeting only lasting about five minutes according to the SPARK website, it's not stopping the girl-power movement. Franco writes an update of what happened at yesterday's meeting with Teen Vogue. "They gave Emma and Carina copies of Teen Vogue and told them to use it to “learn about the magazine,” as though we didn’t already know about it–I’m a Teen Vogue subscriber!.... This was obviously disappointing to us, but we will still continue on our mission to get Teen Vogue to stop altering the appearances of the girls in their magazine. Teen Vogue has an incredibly large readership that supports them immensely, and now it’s time for the magazine to do the same for their readership."

After the fashion show, outside of Conde Nast

The SPARK movement is very dedicated to what they do and the girls who represent it are speaking out on behalf of the --according to their website-- 75% of girls, who feel depressed after minutes of reading magazines. And even though Teen Vogue wasn't very receptive to the idea, SPARK is determined to make a change in the way girls and women are portrayed. "They have the choice to be the heroes in this story; help them make that decision," Franco wrote.

***Photos are from SPARK Summit's facebook.