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Companies are aware of the drastic impact they have on those who buy their product and they spend over $200 billion a year on advertising. "Adverting sells products based on an image, an illusion, rather than the actual use it has. Nike shoes are not simply a shoe, but supposedly a gateway into another life." Spending up to one third of their operating budgets on advertising, companies like Nike and Coca-Cola become some of the largest corporations (Moore).
This money pays for the celebrities and beautiful models that sell their products through advertisements. It definitely is not true that only beautiful, size 2 models can advertise products, but unattractive people or those who aren't as beautiful (just cute), seem to be in the minority in commercials and other advertisements. In the February issue of Cosmopolitan, there are over 150 advertisements. Out of these, there was only one ad that showed a girl with a "less-than-perfect-body" (Cosmopolitan 169). The majority of women in advertising are very thin and tall; those who model fashions "weigh 23% less than the average female and a young women between the ages of 18-34 has a 7% chance of being as slim as a catwalk model and a 1% chance of being as thin as a supermodel" (mediascope.com). .
Seeing these beautiful women can be damaging to young girls. When commercials relate physical beauty to being happy, these young girls begin to have a distorted body image that only grows throughout their lives. A survey of Girl Scouts showed that one third of the 234 girls (ages 10 to 11) were dieting. This survey also showed that over one quarter of the girls agreed that pictures of thin girls and women make them wish that they were thin too (you.com). Time magazine found that 80% of all children had dieted by the time they had reached fourth grade (Moore). Another study of young girls showed that "forty-seven percent the girls were influenced by magazine pictures to want to lose weight, but only 29% of the girls were actually overweight.