Being comfortable in your own skin comes with age, but social media is making it harder

WHEN Helen Mirren felt self-conscious about her body, she was only a young woman. Confidence comes with age.

But I do think it’s much harder for young girls these days.

I really worry about my daughter Ciara, who is only 16, because teenage girls are bombarded with images like

By the mid-90s, Nirvana was on the radio, Pulp Fiction was on the big screen and heroin chic had taken over the catwalk. Kate Moss was the new queen bee in the celeb world. And just as with Twiggy, no one wanted to be curvy. The new look was The Waif – petite, small-chested and almost androgynous. Kate, with a 23in waist and 34A bust, cooed: “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels”, while the Calvin Klein ads made skinny women and skinnier men the norm. At 5ft 7in, Kate was also inches shorter than her supermodel predecessors. The trend was echoed in Hollywood, as Winona Ryder became the new golden girl. But that didn’t stop 6ft 1in Jodie Kidd cashing in on the heroin chic look of the grunge era. Was it all just a coincidence that bulimia patients in the UK increased threefold in the early 90s? never before. When Helen said she didn’t look like Twiggy, she probably just saw pictures of her in magazines and adverts. Now young girls are Posh Beckham bombarded with perfect pictures of Kim Kardashian and Kylie Jenner and so on – not just in magazines and on TV but on social media, too.

Lots of these images are edited, so sometimes you don’t know what’s real and what’s not. So when Dame Helen said it’s good Kim K is bringing the bum back, I still think we have unhealthy expectations of perfection because social media images can be altered.

When I was in my 20s and on stage in the 1980s, I was so self-conscious of my big boobs. I didn’t match the Jane Fonda-style athletic body that was en vogue then. But body shapes change constantly and it seems we will never be happy if we don’t fit into what’s in fashion. So it’s about being comfortable in your own skin, and that’s what’s sexy.

You can be the most beautiful woman in the world, but if you don’t hold yourself right or aren’t confident, you won’t have sex appeal.