OpEd: “I must always be pretty.” What’s Changed (and hasn’t) in 20 years of the Real Beauty Conversation

I’m 11.

My two best girlfriends, Becky, and Sarah are sleeping over. We’re up way too late and have eaten way too many Doritos and Snickers bars. We have a horror movie on in the background. One of the “Nightmare on Elm Streets”.

We are squeezed in next to each other on my couch with our pre-teen legs folded over themselves. Sarah suggests we put our thighs side by side and measure them. See who has the smallest and the biggest. I have no idea why she wants to do this, but my friends and I have been doing a lot of body comparisons lately. Seeing who can eat the most. Who can eat the least. Who has bigger boobs? Who has a flatter tummy? And of course, after the infamous Kellogg’s commercial who can “pinch an inch”.

Sarah’s is the smallest. Becky’s is medium. And I have been awarded the largest thighs. It’s a title I’ll remember daily when I begin my first diet In a few weeks and then ultimately develop an eating disorder by the time I’m 12. This will last me most of my young adult life.

It’s moments like these, personal and private, that propelled me into the career I have today. Educating, speaking, and advising brands on cultural issues predominantly impacting women and girls. Teaching about cultural trends like body obsession and disordered eating that still affects 28.8 million people in the US today.

One saving grace from growing up in the 80’s, pre-internet, was that while I had a calorie-restricted childhood, I didn’t know just how many other girls outside of my immediate friend group were also growing up and hating their bodies.

Unless I knew them personally, I had no way of knowing what other girls were eating for breakfast, or how much they had worked out (or what they wore when they exercised). Because we didn’t have social media, streaming content, or global access to everyone’s lives within a swipe of our fingers – I was still surrounded in a bit of ignorant bliss about the body image of my peers. I did, however, grow up in a home where my mom talked about her thighs, too, keeping track of her weight on a chart in her bathroom above her scale. So, my body dissatisfaction and preoccupation with thinness couldn’t be blamed on someone else’s IG feed, it was born in my own home and influenced from a variety of factors including my mom who also went on her first diet at 11. She was taught that thinness = beauty from her mother and she passed down that belief to me. And I held on to that belief for many years in silence.

Marisol is 11.

She’s my best friend’s daughter and I’ve witnessed her growing up since she was four years old. She received a text this morning that her girlfriends are meeting at Sephora this Saturday. Her friend, Emily, has been saving up to buy the Drunk Elephant firming moisturizer, and her other friend, Andi, wants to get a sample of retinol. Andi’s sister has a popular YouTube channel. She’s 17 but looks much older. She walks people through her multi-step skincare routine and links to her favorite products. She is knowledgeable about beauty and Andi wants to be just like her.

Their favorite Sephora is across the street from the mall. They usually stop at the mall first to get a Boba. The last time they were at the mall they also went to the arcade, where two older boys ended up following them around and tried to get them to go to the parking lot for a drink. The girls knew to get out of there quickly and thankfully nothing happened.

They talk about how much safer they feel at Sephora, playing with make-up samples and how most of the people working there are young women who are eager to help them.

Marisol comes home with a few samples and one plumping lip gloss, and she’ll soon scroll TikTok and watch a YouTube video on how to prevent wrinkles. She hasn’t had her period yet, but she is already consumed with aging and looking her best.

In my 30 years of educating about beauty standards and body image impacting girls and women so much has changed. And so much hasn’t.

Girls still struggle with their body image. 80% of 10-year-old American girls have been on a diet. And in 2020, the CDC found more Americans, especially women, are on a diet compared to a decade ago.

It makes sense then that the diet industry is still worth $325.02 billion globally.

And according to the new research out from Dove for its 20th anniversary of the Campaign for Real Beauty – AI is now poised to be the biggest threat to women and girl’s self-confidence with 1 in 3 feeling pressure to alter their appearance because of what they see online, even when they know it’s fake or AI-generated.

I was Dove’s first Global Ambassador when we launched the Campaign for Real Beauty two decades ago. The original research we conducted in 2004 revealed that only 2% of women worldwide considered themselves beautiful. By 2010, that number doubled to 4%. Now in 2024, Dove research found that globally, 2 in 5 women would give up a year or more of their lives if they could achieve their ideal appearance or body size.

And while we’ve produced an academically validated curriculum that has reached over 100 million young people across 153 countries - there is clearly still so much work to be done.

When we launched this culture changing campaign in 2004, our message was about the proliferation of retouching and photoshopping, and how these altered images of beauty were creating unrealistic goals for women and girls because they simply weren’t real. Back then, photoshopping was a professional tool that only photographers and editors had access to. Now, it is an app on most of our phones.

Two decades later, 25-year-old beauty influencers have more followers than some cities have populations. And we just have more ways to communicate about everything – which is both wonderful and terrible.

Girls like Marisol tell me that they feel incredible pressure – not just to be popular (that aspiration is centuries old) but to always be put together.

She confesses: “I have to always be pretty”.

The incessant media consumption of stories not about celebrities - but about other aspirational young women - are like surround sound. Literally. Marisol fell asleep last night watching a TikTok about one 15-year-old girl’s journey with intermittent fasting.

So, if everything has changed and nothing has changed when it comes to the constant pursuit of beauty ideals, what are we to do? Well, having lived through this work for three decades, here’s what I’ll say:

As long as there is money to be made off of our insecurities (mostly manufactured through media and advertising) we will always have folks like me, my mom, Marisol, you, and the girls you love all lining ourselves up for comparison.

We won’t always understand why we do it, but we’ll be in this pursuit of beauty ideals that are unrealistic…until we aren’t. Until we have enough education and then wisdom to know that the real work to feel good is an internal process and doesn’t come from chasing external validation in a pants size, a number on the scale or the lack of wrinkles on your face.

And we can become more literate at any stage of our life but it’s so important we instill this knowledge early in our young people. Media literacy helps us (all) to understand the complex messages we’ve been indoctrinated with – often starting in our own homes – and then spreading furiously through our social media landscape.

As parents and caregivers to girls, we need to dismantle the belief that our physical appearance is tied to our worth. (I know, I know, easier said than done but THIS is the work!) And I can speak from experience that when we begin to understand where our own unrealistic beauty ideals were born from, we can then work to replace them with a new set of values.

The most helpful element of media literacy is to ask questions. To think critically.

To challenge stereotypes and messages sent to us thousands of times a day, even sometimes by the people we most admire.

Those of us who are not digital natives cannot hide from the impact that social media and now AI will have on how we view beauty in this world. The toothpaste is out of the tube, as I like to say. So as adults, we must stay diligent, informed, and curious about how our girls learn to value themselves and the technological tools they are using to express themselves to the world.

In 30 years, I’ve seen the entire concept of “real beauty” evolve. It’s taking on as many definitions as there are people who embody the idea. Being yourself in a world that wants to make you someone else is still a pressure we fight every day.

But that is where the good news of social media comes in…young people today are wiser about these messages, and learn them younger, because they have the ability through social media to help democratize beauty by telling and sharing their own unique lives.

Search long enough and train your algorithm and you can see as many videos as possible from amazing people like Annabella, a 20-year-old college student in Vermont, who spends her time debunking beauty myths on her IG (and is now becoming a media studies major!).

Or Trini, an 18-year-old, who is in recovery from an eating disorder and dedicates her large TikTok following to showcasing the beauty she finds in her everyday life (from puppies to pancakes). Expanding her definition of everyday beauty is helping her heal.

And watching her videos also helps me heal my inner child who still carries that “thigh game” memory with her to this day.

I didn’t have a chance to hear voices like those as a child (neither did my mom) and my hope for the future is that we continue to educate, communicate, and share honestly about how we can fortify our confidence and well-being through healthy relationships, critical thinking about the media, and encouraging the next generation to feel worthy and eradicate the need to “always be pretty”.

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This OpEd was written by Jess Weiner, the Founder and CEO of Talk To Jess, a creative multimedia consultancy where we work as strategic partners to the world's leading brands including Barbie, Dove, Aerie, Warner Bros. and more.

My team and I address tough cultural and social issues head-on with authenticity, empathy and expertise. We help brands and businesses become more culturally fluent and inclusive in their media, marketing, advertising, and workforce.