Here’s my latest column for the Ham & High:

Every day we are bombarded with literally hundreds of images of people. In our city few surfaces are left without some form of graphical advertising. And as any good advertiser designer will tell you – you can’t sell without a face.

But how often have you ever stopped to study the faces that sell you something? If you took the time you would probably notice something odd about the people enticing you to buy. On close inspection you will find something surreal – teeth that gleam just a bit too brilliantly white, cheek bones that protrude more than is natural and waists that you could only hope to achieve if you had had ribs removed …

In our digital age it has become the norm in the advertising and glamour magazine industry to touch up photos. And so what I hear you say? A toothless wizened hag is unlikely to induce even the most compassionate of consumer to buy the latest widget unless it was Halloween masks. In competitive markets and hard times these canny retailers are merely trying to put themselves ahead of the game.

I’m no stranger to leafing through the odd glamorous magazine myself. But page after page after high gloss page are full of armies of the unreal – a mystical race of people where no blemish goes untouched and no cellulite un-airbrushed. An exclusive club that no-one can enter even if you had unlimited resources, a digital plastic surgeon with Leonardo da Vinci’s touch and boundless energy for the gym to tone the most stubborn love handle.

As a lady of certain age I can (now) shrug off my imperfections and hope my suitors will be interested my humour and passion for people. But what about teenagers and in particular young girls? Images of human ‘perfection-plus’ have become so ubiquitous and impossible to avoid that we must urgently question how they are influencing young minds.

Trading standards would come down on you like a ton of bricks if you falsified the representation of a product. But there is absolute nothing stopping the full on and hidden manipulation of the human form. Caveat emptor you might say, but when our young are bombarded with the subliminal message that beauty is not only desirable but actually physically impossible to achieve then we have a serious issue.

The problem is more than just angst ridden adolescents. Hospital admissions for anorexia have increase by 50% since 1996 and more worryingly sufferers are becoming younger. Of course airbrushing is not only cause, but there is academic research to suggest how digital manipulation contributes to negative self image. It is not difficult to see why. Who can help feeling inadequate when confronted with such unobtainable perfection?

So what’s the solution – lock up our children and ban photoshop? Unsurprisingly, as a liberal this is probably a step too far! But at my party’s conference last month I was successful in getting a policy adopted that would force magazines to indicate clearly whether an image has been tampered with.

A visual prompt would serve as a reminder that the image being viewed is not real. It would offer reassurance to young minds that shouldn’t despair if their teeth aren’t perfectly white or their bum’s rounder than it is flat.

We cannot ignore what has become a serious health problem for our youth. Young people will always aspire, look up to and seek to emulate pop stars and models. Being young is difficult enough without imposing the hurdle of perfection. So let’s give them a helping hand and make sure they know that no-one can achieve the lofty heights of airbrushed beauty.

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