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6 February 2024
Safer Internet Day in Austria: Saferinternet.at published the results of a study on beauty ideals on the internet with a brochure and a quiz to raise awareness about looking behind retouched images and algorithms on social media and to promote diversity and individuality
On the occasion of today's Safer Internet Day, the Austrian service point Saferinternet.at published the results of a study on how beauty ideals on the internet are putting young people under increasing pressure. Saferinternet.at focuses on media education for teachers, parents and teenagers and provides practical tips on the legal side of the internet, for example when it comes to cyberbullying. As a result of the beauty ideals study, ISPA (Internet Service Providers Austria), the cooperation partner of Saferinternet.at, released a (German language) booklet with some tips on how to break out of the mediated and in many cases faked beauty ideals and become self-determined (https://www.ispa.at/wissenspool/broschueren/).
The introduction to the booklet further explains the concept of 'beauty' as constructed by societies and that beauty changes over time and within groups. The less mature or the younger people are, the more they are influenced by ideals of beauty as propagated by social media influencers. The tips in the book are marked with a light bulb as a call to action. The first tip motivates the reader to accept their own body and stop following every beauty trend. It suggests focusing on what you like about yourself as the first step toward self-acceptance. The tips are a practical guide to discovering retouched images, for example. The authors explain why images are retouched, look behind the scenes and share tips on how to trick the algorithms of social media, which tend to show more similar content that we prefer instead of showing a more authentic picture of reality, more diversity.
Another practical tool to raise awareness of the issue is the quiz, developed from the results of the study on how young people deal with beauty ideals communicated via the Internet, to test knowledge about strategies to look beyond staged lifestyle images, filtered beauty shots, the reasons why many people show unrealistic images of their lives, etc. The quiz can be accessed on the same page where selected results of the study are presented, such as that it is important for 64% of the respondents to look stylish (https://www.saferinternet.at/news-detail/neue-studie-schoenheitsideale-im-internet).
By the way: It's a good thing that the current trends in fashion point more to individuality than to the greatest common denominator, as the Berliner Zeitung reports today from Berlin Fashion Week with a review of the latest shows in Paris (source: https://www.berliner-zeitung.de/stil-individualitaet/berlin-fashion-week-diese-drei-themen-dominieren-die-modewoche-li.2184300).
Image: Infographic for the study 'Schönheitsideale im Internet' (Beauty Ideals on the Internet) 2024. Photo: © Saferinternet.at, studioback.at.
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