here is the beauty pressures on Women and young girls from dove which i thought is very helpful:

Today's Beauty Pressures On Girls and Women

By Susie Orbach

Girls grow up knowing that how they look is important. And while girls and women enjoy beauty and fashion, they can also worry about their looks, their hair, their tummies, their breasts, their legs, their size and their shape.

Where do we get this idea at first?
We get our sense of how important this is as we watch our mums and hear her sighs or, less frequently, see her smile of pleasure as she looks at herself in the mirror. That's not to say it is our mum's fault. It is just that, as young girls, we absorb from her how very crucial it is to focus on our bodies.

What about pressures outside the family?
Of course we get the idea that beauty is important from other girls, from Dads, from TV shows, pop videos and ads. We want to enjoy our beauty and be playful with it but often, too often, meeting our own beauty expectations is difficult because we just don't look like the models we see all around us.

What's the downside of this kind of pressure to look beautiful?
Girls can grow up feeling inadequate, fret about their bodies and their looks and feel bad if they don't conform to the pictures of beauty they see projected on them from TV screens, billboards and ads. They can feel they need to change themselves, to diet away their natural shape, exercise compulsively and have cosmetic surgery to feel acceptable. Every girl and woman recognises that beauty is important. But often they do not see themselves as attractive because their uniqueness has not been reflected back to them. What they see in their mirror is someone who is unlike the models.

How sure are we that society out there plays a destructive role in the beauty agenda?
For years, magazines and the fashion industry and Hollywood said that glamour was just fun. No negatives. Girls and women, so it went, like to dress up. They like to press their bodies into different shapes. Just look at the corsets of a hundred years ago. We aren't doing anything special, say the fashion industry.

And of course they are right; women have always been involved in decorating themselves. But it was never imperative before. And it never involved so many women for so much of their lives. In our grandma's time it was important to be beautiful for a few years. Now girls as young as six and women in their seventies and eighties worry if they aren't sufficiently beautiful – and beautiful today means skinny, big breasted, long legged and so on. Some 6-year-olds already don't go to the beach because they feel they are too chubby. 70% of 9-year-old girls are dieting, even if many of them are quite slim and most aren't by any means pudges. In some old people's homes, there are cases of anorexia because the older women feel too fat.

Are you saying the narrow standards for beauty are hurtful to girls and women?
Yes. I think we know they are. If we look at Fiji, a country without the kind of media we are all exposed to, we discover that in 1998, just three years after TV had been introduced to Fiji, 12 out of 100 teenage girls had bulimia. The girls were so affected by the US TV shows that they try to change their bodies so that they would mirror what they saw on TV.

What other kinds of harmful things are happening because of the narrow definitions of beauty?
Recently we've seen the rise of early caesarean births. A few celebrities elected to have their babies at 36 weeks because of the myth that this would make it easier for them to return to their pre-pregnancy bodies. It ignores the importance of those extra pounds for the mother and the good nutrition of the baby and it turns the attention away from Moms being able to just settle in with their babes.

Do you think Dove's Campaign for Real Beauty is helping to change things?
We don't want to give up the quest to be beautiful. I think Dove's promotion of the gorgeousness of ordinary women is important. It is giving women such a lift to see a version of themselves portrayed on the billboards and allowing them to appreciate their own appearance.

What can I be doing to help myself? I don't always feel good.
You probably have friends who you think are beautiful but they don't feel it. See if that applies to you too. If it does, consider just for a few seconds a day (and build up to a few minutes) that you too are seen as beautiful.

You probably have pictures of yourself from a few years ago, that when you look at them, you think how lovely you looked then. Now ask yourself, did you feel lovely then? If the answer is not often enough, then try to appreciate yourself now. It would be awful to look back again next year and realise how pretty you looked and yet how you missed it again.