Sokay, I started this the other day… 

It’s all about the media affect, isn’t it?  Don’t get me wrong… as a teen writer, I love a bit of juicy gossip as much as the next scandalous girl.  But at some point, the diamond-studded line must be drawn.  Even if it is a little blurry. From Gossip girls to fashionwhores, the it shades of limelight just never end.   You know you love it.

Seen at every newsstand, on the television, box office, bookstore, gas station, drug store, convenience market, and checkout lane, wraith forms glare from the realms of glossy magazines and tabloids. For some, the only solution is to enlist the course of rivalry by imitation. Beautiful, tempting images splash across the pages, appearing unblemished in every way imaginable… though obviously, it’s not easy to live up to the Hollywood limelight, even for them. It’s the moment when women are reaching for the pair of jeans at the very back of the clothing rack…where the bigger sizes are hanging. It’s as if they’re deliberately veiled from the rest, like some pariah of fashion civilization. Why? I mean, are women aliens to the rest of society if they aren’t a size zero? It’s the constant reminder that high fashion designers and celebrity stylists prefer size a two or smaller, and thus, precedence is set.

Considering the average American woman reportedly wears a size twelve, how can she possibly correlate the fine line between a healthy well-being and the standards of beauty?  There’s just so much pressure for today’s generation.  The daringly unforgivable fashion kingdom draws a silhouetted sketch of, sometimes, inaccessible expectations. And I love fashion.  Trust me!  But it’s a tough industry. Point blank.

Obviously it takes more than a savage pair of kicks– it takes an enormous amount of self-confidence and determination to step in front of those beaming flashbulbs.  And while stiletto stomping their stuff down the tunnel vision catwalk… rejection and scrutiny inevitably follow. But deathly heroin chic and fashion suicide really isn’t the process in which teens should go about achieving this almighty beauty ambition. These days, those premeditated marketing techniques balancing the dire quest for ‘beauty in a bottle’ seems as galvanized as discovering the celestial Holy Grail or even the Hope diamond.  Sokay, it’s the equivalent to walking the red carpet with your favorite
Hollywood hottie.  At some point, we’ve all (unavoidably) been on this same exasperating mission since the coming of age. 

I’ve said this before.  There’s nothing wrong in that but, and that’s a pretty big but… sadly, none of those phenomenal products or gossipy fabrications are going to Harry Houdini you into someone else. Oh, the pursuits of vanity can be so tedious.

OMFG, why do we strive for excellence?  It’s starting to feel like nothing less than perfection is good enough. Saturating our minds with a media-perfect planet, the inaccessible expectations built for ourselves shocks our egos into a cruel oblivion of rejection when we don’t achieve them. It’s like never getting past the hurdles, which of course makes it easy to forget that even they, the richly gorgeous, are trying to conform to an archetype created by phony-shmony standards. 

What’s a girl to do?  No, Seriously?  I guess.. get over it! 

Sara A. Harris