Yahoo Finance Jameela Jamil: “We’re underestimating the damage caused by photo editing”.
In 1997, Anita Roddick, the late founder of The Body Shop, launched a body-positivity campaign featuring Ruby, a generously proportioned doll. The accompanying slogan read: "There are 3 billion women who don't look like supermodels and only 8 who do."
This was, of course, revolutionary in a decade where the words ‘heroin chic’ were regularly, nonchalantly employed, but what’s more concerning is that now, two decades later, the message still feels significant.
This month, The Body Shop launches its Global Self Love Movement: a campaign to tackle the current confidence crisis. The brand will be inspiring small acts of self love through its Instagram page and the site’s new Self Love Hub in collaboration with a team of ambassadors including political activist Gina Martin; author Charlie Craggs; fitness coach Sophie Butler; and founder of queer content platform Girls Will be Boys, Char Ellesse.
To inform the campaign, The Body Shop commissioned a global study to investigate the extent of the growing lack of self-confidence in adults and young women – and the results are concerning, if not hugely surprising. The research found that one in two women feel more self-doubt than self-love, and 72 per cent often wish their body looked different.
Predictably, heavy users of social media have lower perceived levels of self-love, and younger generations are suffering the most acutely, with nearly 50 per cent of Gen Z women falling into the lowest self-love category.
It’s a tricky line to toe as a beauty company, whose goal is inherently to shift beauty products, but The Body Shop is one of few that has never photoshopped an image, or perpetuated beauty standards in order to sell the solution. And it’s testament to their commitment that Jameela Jamil, one of the most outspoken modern advocates for abolishing harmful beauty standards, has joined the brand to help spread the message. Here, she dissects the factors driving a generation of discontent, and reveals her thoughts on the route back to a safer place...
The Body Shop’s research has found that 72 per cent of women in the UK often wish their body was different. What are the driving forces behind this?
I think photo editing is a huge issue. It no longer just happens in adverts and magazines, where it was toxic enough, now it’s been democratised because of these editing apps. So everyone has them and we've just stopped seeing what real skin looks like, what real thighs look like; everyone’s elongating their bodies and making their waist smaller and all trying to fit this one identical prototype of what’s basically a lab-made doll that 14-year-old boys have conjured up: it’s the Lara Croft video-game character that we’re all supposed to look like.
You go through Instagram, and everyone wants the same kind of doll face, the tiny, tiny, contoured nose, massive lips, big slanted eyes: general Eurocentric beauty but with aspects of different ethnicities that we deem acceptable. But we won't accept the people from those ethnicities: instead, we turn white faces into combinations of them. I think we underestimate the damage that photo editing can cause.
I really like the fact that The Body Shop have never really edited their photographs – they've shown real skin and pores from the start. But photo editing is a crisis on our self confidence because how can we ever compare ourselves to a digitally enhanced image? How can we look in the mirror at night? I now have friends who cannot have a normal photograph taken. They have to FaceTune or filter it – and what do you do in front of the mirror after that? How are you supposed to accept yourself?
Cosmetic surgeons and even the owners of more problematic make-up companies have said in the past that they love editing apps, because they make women hate themselves so much that they then want to go out and permanently look the way they do in these slightly racist filters.
It’s also about the immeasurable greed of social media platforms, allowing these adverts every 30 seconds – a keto app or an intermittent fasting app – all these different apps that cannot possibly replace a medical supervisor who will give you the correct blood tests and boundaries to slowly but surely change your body, whether you're trying to get bigger or smaller. An app cannot replace a doctor, yet we are bombarded with them; they are slippery slopes into eating disorders.
The fact that it is mainstream culture to think that anything outside of your body can detox you is mind blowing to me, considering that that is so far from science. Our bodies detox themselves: our kidneys and our livers are designed specifically to detox us. No green juice can do that. And so it's just the overwhelming misinformation allowed by social media, the amount of dollars that they take from weight-loss companies, and the patriarchy that wants us to be worrying about the way that we look so that we won't think about growing our businesses or our innovations or our mental health or our happiness.
Do you think that companies such as Instagram should be banning filters?
I actually can't give an informed answer on this because I know that there are certain things that complicate this issue. So you have trans people who, in order to be safe, use editing apps to be able to reduce the amount of trolling or harm that they receive. So I'm not against all editing apps for that reason. But I think the first thing we can do is really not allow companies advertising products to use editing apps. I think first, as a start, if we stop seeing, if we stop being bombarded with those images everywhere else, then we will no longer feel the pressure to do so ourselves.
Most importantly, I think we need to educate kids in school on the tools being used to falsify an image. Once we are informed, we are empowered to realise how problematic it is. To educate a child about what an editing app is, how false what they’re seeing is, and how bad for their self esteem and their mental health it is, may well urge that child away from getting into that field. In my opinion, it's much easier to treat these things preventatively, but I don't think it would be right for me as a cis person to say ‘ban all filters or apps’, because there are people who need them for safety.”
So perhaps the way we start to undo this issue is by first looking at the curriculum…
Yes! Oh my god, stop telling us about igneous fucking rocks, and tell us about consent. Tell us about beauty standards and tell us about eating disorders and the fact that 30 per cent of people who have an eating disorder with never, ever recover. Tell them that eating disorders are the number one cause of death in any mental illness. Start educating kids about mental health, and real self love – not sheet masks – real self love, like really, fundamentally starting to understand and celebrate the human beings that they are.
Our curriculums are so deliberately helpless. And not only are we not educating children, we're also not educating their parents, so they have no idea what their kids are looking at. Our schooling system has the profound opportunity to save a generation from mental health issues, which will only, by the way, improve our GDP. If you send the next generation into the world with with more access to mental stability, the right vocabulary, the right understanding of how they feel, then they're more likely to be more work efficient; they are less likely to have health problems, they are less likely to need medication, therefore stressing the National Health Service less. There would be less suicide.
It's very reassuring to see on the Self Love Index, that there is at least an improvement in the way that people are starting to feel about themselves, but there's a lot of work to do and, and we could do it. Let's treat the cause not the symptom, and get them while they're young. I was 11 when my eating disorder started festering, and it was the same for a lot of my friends, so that's when it often starts. That's when we could get rid of all the damage before it takes off.
Did the media have a large part to play in the issues you faced when growing up?
Absolutely, and I strongly feel that editing and airbrushing photographs in advertising should be illegal. It's literally false advertising. You should not be allowed to legally advertise anti-ageing cream, moisturiser, foundation, or mascara using any trickery. I cannot believe that is legal. I think in 10 years' time, we will look back at that and be so horrified by the depths of the sewer that capitalism dragged us into. I think ‘heroin chic’, photo editing, and the impossible and ever-changing beauty standards [contributed to] my anorexia, but it's very important to stress that eating disorders can come from control issues, from trauma, from many things that have nothing to do with the way that you look, and they can happen at any size to any gender at any age. I always worry that because of the stuff with me and the Kardashians, other people think I think that eating disorders are only to do with a subconscious cosmetic obsession. That's not true: it just happens to be mine.
Do you feel positive that women have had the time in the past year to address their perception of themselves? And do you think that that positivity is increasing?
I do think that positivity is increasing. I do think it's great that both ‘need’ and ‘must-have’ are no longer in our vocabulary: you can choose to have a manicure, but perfectly acceptable for us to see your real nails out in the world. I don't see people apologising for not wearing make-up on Zoom anymore, and that's fantastic. I can't believe that was something that we did for decades when caught without make-up. I’ve never heard a man say that. I've never heard a man apologise for his face, ever.
And I think that this moment of stillness and having to get used to our real selves in the mirror every day is really good for us. I hope that the ways in which we're being doubled down on by diet and detox companies is not going to impact us, but we have to be very, very watchful. They are panicking – they weren't able to freak us out about our January bodies, or our beach bodies last year – so now that we've heard that the UK is opening up on June 21, there's a panic in, ‘oh no, I have to lose the pandemic weight that I gained.’ And so all these diet and detox companies are going to be stressing us out about what our post-lockdown body is going to be. Stressing people about what they look like during a global crisis shows a desperation in the industry.
I feel like a lot of those insidious dieting messages haven’t gone away, they’ve simply been rebranded. A lot of the ‘wellness’ industry is perpetuating the same messages, in a friendlier new guise.
It’s massively complicit. What we need are brands that are focusing on our mental wellness and I think that's what this campaign is about. It’s about mental health, it's about your inner self love. True wellness, when it comes to your body, is just teaching people to eat intuitively, giving them the autonomy to make the choice of what they choose to put in their mouth. It’s listening to cravings, not counting calories, not living by an app, not starving ourselves, living in deprivation and developing orthorexia and all these old habits and relationships with foods. That's not wellness, that's distraction.
Keeping people in a state of shame and panic is not going to help anyone. It also isn't going to achieve any kind of long-term results: if you're trying to gain weight or lose weight, these things are done slowly, carefully, and have to be supervised by experts. This impatience culture of the ‘quick fix’ tells me they are trying to allude to us that there's an emergency; that fat is an emergency. And that's why we must take the quickest, most dangerous approach to reducing it.
Fat is not an emergency. Fat is not an indicator of health. Lizzo could outrun me, pick me up, throw me out of a window. I'm fairly certain anyone on this earth has lower cholesterol levels than I do. No one ‘concern trolls’ me, but they do her. Because we have all this misinformation of this emergency around fat. And so a quick fix is really not only ineffective, stupid and designed to fail, but also it’s a really dangerous messaging around the way that we look.
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