By signing this petition, you are signalling to our community and our entire beauty industry that we want to change the narrative and make [digitally altered] body image transparency the norm.

For too long beauty has been synonymous with a narrow set of, let’s be honest, unattainable ideals. As a society, we’ve celebrated thinness, youth and flawlessness — elevating certain attributes while vilifying everything beyond the strict parameters of ‘perfect’.

Spots, wrinkles, cellulite, body hair — these are just examples of normal things that have been airbrushed out of ads and model images for decades — meaning to be 'beautiful’ we have had to reject the reality of our bodies and adapt to a mould that wasn’t made for us.

A recent Mental Health Foundation report found that 35% of adults and 31% of teenagers in the UK surveyed felt ashamed or depressed because of their body image [1] — so not only is the search for perfection skewing our perception of ourselves, but it’s also collectively damaging our self-esteem.

Comparison culture, stoked by social media’s endless stream of aspirational but mostly unrelatable imagery, is only fueling the problem. With so many filters and apps that can instantly blur, tweak and ‘beautify’, image enhancement has never been more accessible or more acceptable. It is shocking that 80% of girls have said they had already applied a filter or used a retouching app to change the way they look in their photos by age 13.[2]

Not only is it frighteningly easy to manipulate an image, but it's also near impossible to know when it’s been done, and this lack of transparency can contribute to growing instances of disordered eating, anxiety, and depression. The number of children being treated for eating disorders on paediatric wards in the UK has more than doubled in the last three years[3] and according to a recent study carried out by Dove, 77% of girls have tried to change or hide at least one body part or feature before posting a photo of themselves online. [4]

To all those reading this: we urge you to support us in our quest to challenge the [standardised beauty] narrative by signing this petition to call for image transparency. We hope this petition will motivate the Government to review its policy surrounding body imagery and make it mandatory for brands, advertisers and influencers to state when an image is digitally tweaked, as well as encourage all content creators to pause before publishing digitally manipulated photographs.

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Source(s):

1.https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm5803/cmselect/cmhealth/114/report.html#heading-1

2 & 4. Based on results conducted by Edelman Intelligence in the U.S.

3. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/children-mental-health-wards-hospital-b2328913.html