A Research of Body Image

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Lookism is spread largely because many people think beautiful people are treated better and receive more favors. This trend has been influenced by mass media and impacted by commercial marketing strategy. The expectation for the beauty have risen higher than ever. People expect beautiful body and beautiful face which are more difficult to meet the standard of beauty. People desire tall and skinny body. The purpuse of this study was to find out body image from college females in the age which they are very sensitive to appearance. This research focused to find out how they perceived their own body shape and their perception of the most ideal body shape. Measuring tool for the research was 9 pictures of body silhouette from very skinny to very fat. To analyse the respondents' objective body image, Body Mass Index were employed. The result of this research indicated that there were distinct differences between their subjective body images and ideal body images. This result indicated that they were not satisfied with their own body shape and hence they were not confident towards their body images. Even though their objective bodies were normal or under weight, they still felt they were over weight. This meant their body images were misrepresented. They preferred thinner bodies even though their bodies were perfectly normal and healthy. But these misrepresented body images could be unhealthy physically, psychologically, or socially. These results showed that college females were overly obsessive with superficial appearance rather than improving ones capability to be more competitive in the society. From this research, I tried to find out perception of body image and it's distortion which was debated a lot in our society. I also want to provide basic reference material for establishing the body image study.