A cover of Cosmo Girl is lying face up on a desk. A girl walks over, and sees a flawless model on the cover. She immediately knows what she wants; to be that model. What she doesn’t know is the amount of technology that went into recreating that model’s face and body before actually putting it on the cover of the magazine.

She continues her day craving to live the life of that model; wanting the feeling of being beautiful. She begins to see something hideous in the mirror everyday. She cannot stand to look at herself any longer, and immediately does all she can to look like the person society wants her to look like. She begins to starve herself, wear loads of make-up, and base her life and her wardrobe around teen magazines. She’s only 10 years old. She’s loosing her childhood, but she doesn’t care. She just wants two things; to look like everyone else, and fit in.
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Across the country in California, a woman walks into a modeling agency. She was told to come to the photo shoot without any make-up, without her hair brushed, and to be dressed in simply a t-shirt and shorts.

Her weak blonde hair is shooting up in all different directions, and her skin is pale white. Dark bags shadow her icy blue eyes, and her lips are overly chapped. She hasn’t taken a shower in three days, and according to her doctor, she’s way overweight for her height.

The moment she walks into the agency, make-up artists and professional hairdressers surround her like a mob of fans. In a couple of hours, she’s completely transformed.

She walks over to the camera area, and poses just as she’s told to. She’s like a robot, now. The photographer is her Queen and she is her slave. Whatever she’s told to do, she does it. An hour passes, and finally the photo shoot is complete.

A week later, the photos of her are sent to her house. She opens the package and gasps.

The photos cannot possibly be of her.
In them, her hair is washed, lathered, and rinsed. It is curled to perfection, and frames a totally tan face. Her eyebrows are closer in towards her nose. Her eyes are huge, and drenched in eye make-up. Her lips are glossed and plumped even more than what the make-up artists had done to them that day.
She looks at her body in the photos, and nearly faints. She’s a stick in every one of them.
She looks in the mirror, and cries.
This isn’t me, she thinks, Not even close.
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Back in Massachusetts, that same girl is waiting for perfection to come to her. In California, that same woman wishes reality had never crossed her path.

Most Americans, especially woman, base their lives around what society tells them to base it around. Advertisers sell their clothes on beautiful stick-figure models to lure the consumers into wanting to buy the clothes, and look exactly like those models.
Anyone who has about five dollars can buy a magazine. That means that anyone can lose who he or she really is.
Models have their flaws, too. Unfortunately, like that woman in California; the camera and the computer can work together to completely rid those flaws from society’s view.
If only there was a magazine that had a picture on every page of the billions of different people in this world. If only there was a caption under every single picture that said: This is how this person looks, and if you look in the mirror right now, you’ll see that that’s how you look. Every person was born different from one another, and every person was meant to live as himself or herself. Not as someone else.
That caption would state the truth for everyone. Make-up or no make-up, a person shouldn’t change their look because a model does. A person shouldn’t lose weight to simply be skinny, but stay a good weight to be healthy.
The next magazine you pass, or the next model on a cover you see that’s almost shouting to you that you have to be like him or her, flip it over. Then, make a note to yourself to start living on the cover of the magazine called your life, where every page is what you make of it, and every choice is yours.