Air-brushed models and computer perfected photographs litter our everyday media. We as a society are surrounded by flawless people living in fantasy worlds of superficial bliss. Everyday, adults and teens feel the pressure that these perfect icons place on them each time they turn on the television, flip through a magazine or surf the internet. This overwhelming pressure leads many to believe that they are inadequate. People feel like they can not be successful if they do not look like and use the same products that super models use. What most people don’t see is that even the perfect have a great deal of imperfections.

It all starts with advertising. Commercials and posters insist that a person can not truly be happy if they do not purchase their products. Immaculately shaped and tanned idols rule the media and provide a false idea of what people have to look like in order to be popular and successful. Distorted body-image and self –esteem are the results of these influences. Insecurity and inadequacy fill the thoughts and lives of the average person simply because they are not perfect.
However, what most people don’t realize is that everyone has to have flaws; they make us individuals and humans. Our flaws are what builds society and make us unique. The idea of perfection that is plastered throughout advertising only serves to make us feel inadequate and thereby drive us to purchase the advertiser’s product in hopes of making ourselves better.

On the flip side of perfection, no one really sees the effects that the media has on the individual person’s emotional and mental state. An estimated eight million people across America suffer from eating disorders related to poor body-image. Men, women, and children alike are tearing themselves apart because they don’t measure up to perfection. We are given this ideal and told that we must match it; however, when we fall short of this ideal, we deem ourselves failures and result to using self destructive means as retribution. People are falling apart because they realize that they don’t meet the ideal, what they don’t realize is that the ideal is unattainable for everyone.

Behind the scenes of every picture perfect model is a team of makeup and graphic artists. The people we see in the spotlights and on the front of Cover Girl are not what they appear to be. Not even the celebrities that we hold in high esteem are perfect. Our society has built them up to be perfect through computer air-brushing and editing. In a sense, we have created our own demise. Society has provided a flawless image and maintains that image through falsities. No one is perfect, no one can become perfect, and no one ever will be perfect. This is the plain truth that people need to realize. We will never measure up to the perfect men and women because perfection does not exist.

In the end, supermodels and celebrities are not the idealistic gods that we make them up to be. They are average people with a whole team of artists behind them. We should not strive to become perfect like them because they themselves are imperfect. The feeling of insufficiency that we all experience as a result of the media is all founded upon a falsehood of impractical standards. People need to realize that they can be successful and wonderful without the glamorous and superficial products. At the end of the day, we are all flawed; every last one of us is an imperfect perfection.