Global Body Your Body: Your Image

Hi, I'm Stephanie Heart.

I'm 24 and for the last four years, I've campaigned here in the UK

for teenagers to value themselves for who they are

and not just how they look.

But in this film, I am going to be looking at how Western culture

is impacting body image confidence around the world.

And what better place to start than here, Heathrow Airport,

the biggest airport on earth.

Planes fly back and forth to 193 destinations right around the world,

and every day, nearly 200,000 people arrive and depart.

It really is a global village.

People landing here in the UK are bombarded

with thousands of images of super-slim women and six-pack men.

But around the world, people still hold very different views

of what they considered beautiful or handsome.

But it is not just about the colour of our skin.

It is about the way we dress, style our hair and apply our make-up.

These are the outward expressions of global diversity.

Everywhere on earth, beauty is absolutely in the eye of the beholder.

Let's take a look at a few examples.

For the women of the Suri tribe in Ethiopia,

lip plates are all the fashion - and the bigger the better.

They stretch their lips by gradually increasing the size of the plate.

The women start with a four-centimetre plate,

but they can go up to a 22-centimetre plate.

In Indonesia, the Mentawi women file their teeth into sharp points.

Straight teeth like ours are thought to be ugly.

In parts of Afghanistan, women want their noses to be bigger.

The first cosmetic surgery clinic has now opened in Kabul,

where there is a large demand for nose enlargement jobs.

I bet you guys are thinking this is all about the girls.

You would be wrong.

There are many traditional cultures where it is the men

who do the dressing up.

Only male birds of paradise have really beautiful plumage.

In PNG, the human males take their fashions from the birds

that share their jungle home.

Once a year, they come together to party and it is the men

who spend months making fabulous outfits, hoping to get the girls.

The Woodabe tribesman in Niger take beauty so seriously,

that the very first toy they are given as a child is a mirror.

The young men compete in a beauty pageant wearing extraordinary make-up

and dance for days to impress a panel of female judges.

Those examples are just incredible.

But there is a problem on our planet.

All around the world there is a takeover going on.

Massive companies looking to make lots of money are pushing out global diversity.

In the beauty business, it is not about celebrating cultural diversity.

It is about creating carbon copies.

And the impact can be devastating.

I have come here to meet up with Philippa Diedrichs

from the Centre for Appearance Research based here in Bristol.

Great to see you, Philippa.

Really nice to see you too, Stephanie.

So there have been a few studies looking at the impact

of Western fashion and beauty on people around the world.

Can you tell me more about that?

One study really stands out which was done in Fiji.

What they did was... In 1995,

there were very few islands in Fiji that had televisions.

They asked lots of women about their body image

and how they felt about the way they looked.

Three years later, there were televisions in almost every household

on the island and they measured the girls' body image again.

What they found was they felt a lot worse about themselves in terms of how they looked.

What this suggests is television and a lot of the beauty ideals

that we see on TV can have quite a damaging effect on young girls.

Also, looking at these magazines from Taiwan, China

and for the black community, they have a lot of skin lightening.

What do you think about that?

What I find is it is really ridiculous because as you suggested

in magazines that are targeted towards black girls or Asian girls

or any girls which might have a darker skin tone,

they get sold and marketed products about making your skin lighter.

But when you look at magazines that target white girls,

they are also told their skin is not OK either, and they should be darker.

We get nobody winning in the situation. Nobody is perfect.

The global beauty business is big business,

making close to £200 billion every year.

This is an industry whose future growth depends on making men,

women and children around the world feel bad about the way they look.

Selling dream products that indeed are just dreams,

and in the process making the world a boring place.

Let's appreciate our natural beauty and not forget how exciting

the world is with all these different, gorgeous people in it.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd