REAL TEENS SPEAK OUT, MAKE MEDIA LISTEN

14-year-old Julia Bluhm, fed up with page after page of pictures of perfect, predominately white girls, decided to do something to change it. She launched an online petition stating “I want to see regular girls that look like me in a magazine that’s supposed to be for me. For the sake of all the struggling girls all over America, who read Seventeen and think these fake images are what they should be, I’m stepping up.” Launched through change.org, the petition “asking Seventeen to include one unaltered, Photoshop-free spread every issue” gained more than 84,000 signatures… and in August 2012, Seventeen responded by publishing a “Body Peace Treaty”, vowing to “celebrate every kind of beauty” and pledging to “never change a girls’ body or face shapes with retouching. 

The success over Seventeen has sparked a new petition targeting Teen Vogue.