Sometimes, I like to buy a real trashy magazine. Not one of my usual glossies with the clothes, the models, and yes sceptics, they contain world news reports too! You know the ones with the celebrity gossip… Who’s dating who, how bad someone dressed for a red carpet event, and who fell out of a taxi after a night out.
I like to sit on a train journey with a huge coffee and flick through each page; it’s a sort of guilty pleasure. Quite often the word ‘shame’ goes through my head in a sort of mocking way too.
I know most of my friends do it too, and there’s no shame in admitting that it makes me feel good! Yes I think it’s bad that magazines put really unflattering shots of celebrities on beaches. It’s really not fair on them, and yes it could do real harm. BUT it makes a massive change from the super airbrushed images of unblemished skin, and washboard stomachs.
If it wasn’t for the usual airbrushing, I wouldn’t care, but it does make you feel better about yourself doesn’t it? There are the ridiculous celebrity tips too. The ones you know they don’t stick to, and if they do they must have a really dull life.
Apparently when Beyonce [I want to be her] Knowles fancies a chocolate bar, she eats a banana instead. I’m sorry love, we in the real world know that a banana just won’t cut it when all you want is a big slab of Dairy Milk. I very much doubt this works for her either. Yet it’s all too easy to say you do something just to seem in control, and people will buy into this after all.
It’s the really trashy magazines that you guiltily flick through, and feel awful for doing, that could destroy the myth. If you believed all of the high end glossies and pictures you saw on the internet, you would believe that celebrities are perfect. They’re not.
Victoria Beckham is successful in fashion, and is attractive, but apparently she has really bad skin. Gwyneth Paltrow eats a ridiculously healthy diet, yet it’s caused her to have brittle bones. Lily Allen apparently has a third nipple. Then there are lots of celebrities bringing out fitness DVDs at Christmas to save their career, and completely ditching the routine themselves months later. Oh look, the same issues we can face everyday.
All these celebrities and models we see are just normal. They’re not super heroes, and they all have the same flaws we do, they just have someone highly paid to cover them up. Without the airbrushing, PR cover-ups, and personal advisors, they’re all just human. They are far from perfect, just like us!