One way you can see this happening is in the makeover episode of each season

For example, giving an african american woman a perm to make her hair longer and smoother, when she is proud of her natural tight curls. The show gives off the vibe that no matter what you naturally look like, you can still look better.

The show isn’t all bad, though. Tyra Banks, the producer of the show and main judge, is great at including diversity, such as women of all races, women with children, women with different sexual orientations, women with curves, and there was even a woman with Aspergers Syndrome included in the model contestants. It’s great, because Tyra is showing that any type of person can be a model.

“It depends on how you use it. If you're using it as a tool to document feeling good about yourself and you’re just taking mementos of living a great life, that’s fine.”

“The concern lies when people who are using it to create a personae that will be approved of, i.e., how many Facebook or social media clicks, 'likes,' and approvals they get. Facebook and other types of social media create a feedback loop, and some people take more to feed their self-esteem, which can become more important than simply documenting the experience.”

Jess Weiner, Global Self-Esteem Ambassador for Dove, a social messaging strategist, and CEO of Talk to Jess, has seen a considerable rise in self-esteem issues with the pressure to constantly be camera-ready. “I have seen a remarkable shift is self-esteem issues with the rise of the selfies," she says. "The pressure to be camera-ready can elevate self-esteem issues, with the pressure of commenting on posts and with the rise of social media. It has a more competitive aspect, and that can really put the pressure on.”

The key is to not get obsessed with the selfie as a genre, says boyd, "but to appreciate it as a window into teens' lives—including the good, bad, and ugly."

With Facebook becoming a prominent resource in young people’s’ therapy sessions, they could provide a useful jumping off point for addressing a teen’s or young adult’s self-perceptions.

“Psychologically speaking, there may be some benefit to participating in sharing selfies because this practice is interwoven in our social culture and is a way to interact socially with others.”

selfies could be a way for therapists to break the ice and start a dialogue about what the teen was feeling when the self-portrait was taken, or why he snapped the picture in the first place

the material that children and adolescents view online — selfies included — can be influential in molding their sense of self.

y the most

Psychologist Jill Weber, Ph.D., says there's a danger that your self-esteem may start to be tied to the comments and Likes you get when you post a selfie, and they aren't based on who you are—they're based on what you look like. On one hand, seeking validation is totally normal

But according to Dr. Weber, there's more to it than that. "In my experience, girls who repeatedly post selfies struggle with low self-esteem," she says

he three things that correlate most strongly with a self-loathing screen hangover are basically the three things that Instagram is currently for: loitering around others’ photos, perfunctory like-ing, and “broadcasting” to a relatively amorphous group

“I would venture to say that photographs, likes, and comments are the aspects of the Facebook experience that are most important in driving the self-esteem effects, and that photos are maybe the biggest driver of those effects,”

Instagram is exclusively image-driven, and images will crack your mirror

“A photo can very powerfully provoke immediate social comparison, and that can trigger feelings of inferiority. You don’t envy a news story.”

“If you see beautiful photos of your friend on Instagram,” she says, “one way to compensate is to self-present with even better photos, and then your friend sees your photos and posts even better photos, and so on. Self-promotion triggers more self-promotion, and the world on social media gets further and further from reality.

“You spend so much time creating flattering, idealized images of yourself, sorting through hundreds of images for that one perfect picture, but you don’t necessarily grasp that everybody else is spending a lot of time doing the same thing.”

Again, this happens all the time on Facebook, but because Instagram is image-based, it creates a purer reality-distortion field.

ad of obesity, citing a recent trip to Minnesota where  she said she could “only kindly de

Photoshop to make people “look their best,” and condemned Americans for worrying too much over anorexia inste

scribe most of the people I saw as little houses.”

“If children grow up seeing thin women in advertisements, on television, and in film they accept this as reality and try to imitate their appearance and their actions”(Nature vs. Nurture, Shea, 1).

“The ideal female has become thinner while the average American woman has become heavier…”(Domil, 2).

The media is only going to get worse and put more pressure on the self body image of how it should “ideally” look

It is important to remember that what you are viewing is only a small sliver of someone’s life, which for the most part, is heavily embellished and mostly rooted in fantasy. When such images are starting to poison the way you look at your own life it may be time to step away from the screen.

Conversely, women who are content with their bodies did not show any effects from viewing thin-ideal advertisements.

“Women who already have low opinions of their physical appearance are at an even greater risk for negative effects from media images,” says Gayle R. Bessenoff, Ph.D., author of the study

The deleterious impact of advertisement is the subject of new research exploring the relationship between the so called “thin-ideal” media message and body-image issues among young women.

University of Connecticut researchers discovered female undergraduates who viewed advertisements displaying ultra-thin women exhibited increases in body dissatisfaction, negative mood, levels of depression and lowered self-esteem.