10,000 girls ask Google every month if they’re pretty enough.
Google is not kind with its answers.
Many girls around twelve lose their confidence. They start worrying about how they look more than how they’re doing. Girls start to self-select out of activities or raising their hand in class because they don’t want to draw attention to the way they look.
There are higher rates of depression, anxiety, cutting and poor body image than ever.
While we can’t blame this all on media, messages in the media and social media reinforce the notion that being pretty is pretty important.
The 1.3 trillion dollar beauty industry consistently tells girls to look thinner, older, sexier, whiter, more tanned, fitter, healthier! Be Real Campaign recently surveyed 1000 young people and 69% were worried about going to school because of their appearance. That’s a lot of worry!
Pretty Smart is a talk to equip young teens with critical thinking. It teaches them:
- how to navigate media & social images and understand what’s real and what’s not.
- that beauty is more powerful as a feeling than an adjective.
- to see through the beauty industry when it tells them they need to change. Because they’ll never win.
- to be kind to themselves, and others, about appearance.
Studies show that if teens are taught how media and advertising work they are less affected by it.
Unilever conducted a two-year worldwide global survey and reported that only 2% of ads show women being intelligent, 3% in managerial positions and only 1% show women being funny. The rest show women as something to look at. That’s not funny.
We want to help teens navigate this world.
We want to raise a generation who feel Pretty Smart about what they see around them.
We want the next generation to be warriors, not worriers!
Book a talk at your school, check out our testimonials.
Listen to Angela talk to Kathryn Ryan on RNZ about Pretty Smart and why it’s needed.
Or send us an email: prettysmarteens@gmail.com
prettysmart.nz 