The UK personal care brand Dove released the results of their third and most detailed so far research on body esteem among women and girls around world. This time they interviewed 10,500 girls and women from 13 countries.
According to the data, low body confidence is a global issue. Still, it is a common problem mostly in countries like USA, Germany, UK, Canada and Australia, where women feel like they must “have it all”. For the USA, it turns out that currently only 50% of the women and girls feel confident about their looks. In comparison, in India 96% of the women said they find themselves beautiful.
So what is the reason for having such a low self-esteem when it comes to how we look? The study has the answer – 65% of girls and 69% of women blamed their anxiety about their appearance on the “increasing pressure from advertising and media to reach an unrealistic standard of beauty”.
Blaming the media is easy – and perhaps reasonable – but we, as a society, all have our fault. We have gone way beyond the healthy care for our bodies and have become obsessed with the way we look, striving to fit into unnatural stereotypes and losing our happiness along the way.
Wouldn’t it be better if we pay more attention to our health and our relationship with others, rather than focusing on our appearance? We definitely think so! And we’d like to see more happy, confident girls and women, who KNOW they are beautiful.