http://www.inquisitr.com/224402/valeria-lukyanova-model-seeks-to-be-real-life-barbie-doll-photos/

Barbie’s Perfect Body

            She is almost there! Valeria Lukyanova has nearly reached the Barbie body through a series of surgeries and many hours working on her hair and make-up. Valeria looks incredibly convincing as a human Barbie.

            Body image has become incredibly important to many people around the world. They constantly want to change their body to meet the “ideal standard of beauty.” But what is the “ideal standard of beauty?” is it the constant change to your body through surgeries to look like a perfectly proportioned doll or is it being comfortable with the body you have, the one you were born in? I choose the latter of the two. Is it really necessary to have a set standard for all people? I think it should be want you want to look like as an individual; what is natural for you. People are willing to go to any height to get to what they think we would look like; what we have been presented and taught from a young age as what is attractive, sexy, and successful.

            This is too realistic and if she gets success as a model by looking like this it will not be good for the young women who already think they need to reach the perfect beauty queen look. Valeria is just another agent putting out the messages that there should be a standard of beauty, as well as contributing to the pressures to meet this standard. It gives the young women the idea that they have to fit the stereotypes of looking good if they want to become popular and sexy, additionally if they want to become a model later in life. Valeria is also presenting the ease and the ways to the opportunities to get this “perfect barbie body” through surgeries. She is exposing young women to the availabilities of plastic surgery.

            The standard of beauty will become even more skewed if more and more women undergo the surgeries necessary to look this “perfect” (although the comments, made by women, throughout this article suggest that some women do not like the appearance and what Valeria has done to herself; they don’t want to look like that). If the number of surgeries that are needed to meet the standard, increases, then there will never is an end to the altering of our bodies needed to constantly have a better, beautiful body. As soon as that standard is met by a large amount of people, then that will be average and no longer the standard of ideal beauty, thus a new standard must be made. It’s a never ending process.

            Young women are under these pressures the most because they are in a stage of life where they strive for the acceptance of their peers and they desire the feeling of fitting in. According to the article “The Plastic Surgery a Model Needs to Look like Barbie,” 5% of 13.1 million body parts that were surgically altered, in 2010, were carried out on a person under the age of twenty; that is about 650,000 surgeries!

            It all starts with the media, what is in our reach, and what and who were interact with on a daily basis. Ranging from the commercials we watch during our favorite TV shows to the billboards we drive by everyday on our way to class and work to the mass media news that we read in newspapers and see on television, there are agents that influence us to act a certain way and believe certain things. If we want to diminish stereotypes, the standard of beauty, and the ideal body image, we must decrease the availability of these media agents and messages, as well as change the way these ways of living are portrayed and presented to us. We must also exercise our freedom to have an open mind and to develop an individual who you want to become; not a robot programmed to live a certain life.

Sources:

·            The Inquisitr. "Valeria Lukyanova: Model Seeks To Be Real-Life Barbie Doll." The Inquisitr. Inquisitr Ltd., 23 Apr. 2012. Web. 26 Apr. 2012. <http://www.inquisitr.com/224402/valeria-lukyanova-model-seeks-to-be-real-life-barbie-doll-photos/>.

·                  Weiss, Piper. "The Plastic Surgery a Model Needs to Look like Barbie." Yahoo! Shine.       Yahoo! Inc., 14 Oct. 2011. Web. 26 Apr. 2012. <http://shine.yahoo.com/fashion/the-plastic-surgery-a-model-needs-to-look-like-barbie-2584798.html>.