Not everyone can be a model. I’ll admit it, I couldn’t. I don’t have the stick thin waist, legs a mile long, and looks that take people’s breath away. But according to advertisements, I CAN look like a model! If I wear Ray-Bans, I can look like Sveva Alviti! If I shop at Abercrombie, I can look like Lonneke Engel! If I wear Nikes, I can look like Marion Jones!

Newsflash. Using the brand of makeup a certain model or celebrity uses won’t make you look like them. Wearing the same clothes as them won’t get you any closer. It won’t make you famous, either. And when you don’t look as good as that model, when the clothes don’t work for you like they do for that celebrity, it certainly won’t make you feel good about yourself.

Every advertisement looks the same. A heavily made up, pretty person clad in expensive clothes and shoes gaze off into the distance. But where are all the ordinary, pretty-in-their-own-way people? The ones that represent the everyday people you see on the streets, the ones that represent the person you see in the mirror?

They have saved ordinary people for the weight loss ads, and the acne treatment ads. Take a person’s flaws, make them obvious, and then show the world how to make their flaws go away through the use of a diet pill or acne cream. And notice, no stick thin models for those ads. Instead, they take a picture of a zit-faced, unsmiling teenager and dull it down, give everything a grayish tone. Except, of course, for the zits, which now are a violent shade of red on the person’s artificially-gray skin. They show the person using their product, sometimes giving a testimony on how well it worked. And then they take the “after” picture. A zit-free, smiling teenager with shining red cheeks and bright eyes fills the page or screen. They make you think “That could be me, I could look like that.”

It’s been proven that two ways companies get people to buy their products are using models in the ads or using celebrities. I wonder if the companies realize that with every ad like that they put out, many more people like themselves less and less.

It’s not only girls that are affected by this. Guys who read magazines have lowered self-esteem. While girls are affected by model’s waist size, good looks, and designer clothes, guys are affected by seeing men who are tan, handsome, have well defined muscles, and who wear expensive Italian suits while drinking expensive beer and driving expensive sports cars (notice the money theme here…). And or course, you can’t forget about all the girls they are surrounded by.

People seeing the models aren’t the only ones getting their self-esteem lowered. Most models have extremely low self-esteem and/or are uncomfortable and insecure with their bodies. Models that are already skinny are often bulimic or anorexic to try to keep that so called “perfect” weight. Some people might think that plus-size models have it even worse. When they see other plus-size models, they are reminded that they are heavy. When they see “normal” models, they are reminded that they are heavy. So either way, they are insecure about their weight and looks.

So my question to you it this. Why can’t we use ordinary people in our companies’ ads? A variety of shapes, sizes, and colors would make everyone feel better about themselves. Girls and boys alike would be able to see pieces of themselves when they read their magazines or watch the commercials on TV. Models wouldn’t be comparing themselves to other models and be striving to be perfect, because there would be no perfect.

One girl wrote to the magazine “Seventeen” and said “I love the models you use in Seventeen! I can always find girls looking drop-dead gorgeous with flat breasts or thick thighs somewhere in the magazine which helps boost the confidence of girls like me who don’t have Hollywood-perfect bodies!”

Both companies AND the public need to step up and change the ads. Companies should be automatically putting real people in their ads and product consumers should be demanding it. So I’ll be reading my magazines and watching for, as the girl who wrote to Seventeen said, girls without the Hollywood-perfect bodies. Watching for girls like me.