Emily Wolfe, Campus Carrier Staff Reporter

Olivia Murphy, staff photojournalist Students discussed our culture’s perception of beauty at a panel held on Nov. 12.

The Cultural Perceptions of Beauty Panel, held on Nov. 12, discussed the definition of beauty according to modern magazines and music videos.

The panel was sponsored by EMPOWER and the women’s and gender studies program to “help young women have a healthy body image,” senior Hannah Henderson, president of EMPOWER, said.

The topics discussed included the perceptions of beauty from the eyes of African-American women, Latina women and white women, the effects of Photoshop and the pressure to get plastic surgery.

First, junior Sara Gheesling presented examples of how many magazines seem to be encouraging individuality and embracing your body when that is not really the case. One of the examples used was a page from Seventeen magazine that was meant to be a fashion guide for a curvy woman. At first glance one might think this is simply trying to help curvy women embrace their bodies with “the right clothes,” but many of the clothes actually minimized and hid the curvy woman’s body.                              

 “It is an asset to these companies to seek out a girl who feels remotely poor about herself,” Gheesling said. “All of that is going to help…tie in revenue, and that’s all they’re really thinking about.”

Henderson then discussed many magazines geared toward Latina and African-American women. These magazines have many of the same negative effects on women’s body image through emphasizing what African-American and Latina women should look like according to stereotypes.

Henderson showed multiple magazine covers, advertisements and photos where black women’s skin tones had been considerably lightened. This is because of a major pressure for black women to be light-skinned to match a white definition of beauty.

“Especially looking at rap music videos, black women are so sexualized,” Henderson said. “The emphasis is on very large breasts and very large butt. Even in real life black women tend to be more curvy but its just hyper-sexualized in the media.”

Senior Lauren Eason took over the discussion and revealed the realities of Photoshop by showing a video sponsored by Dove that is a high-speed Photoshop process. The woman in the video looks nothing like the editors’ finished product.                 Another important topic Eason covered was the huge pressure for women to surgically enhance themselves. Eason countered this by explaining the dangers of many of these surgeries and why they are unnecessary for maintaining a healthy body image.

Just like pictures, video can also be edited to enhance the looks of whomever may be featured, and this also affects women. Senior Katie Chernicky used stills from the three most viewed music videos of the month of October as examples. Each music video had images where women were sexualized and clearly edited or enhanced.