15 minutes to convince us being skinny is beautiful

JUST 15 minutes of looking at pictures of skinny women can convince us that thin is beautiful.

Media obsession with tall, thin celebrities has skewed our sense of how the perfect woman looks – leaving up to half of British women, whose average dress size is 16, struggling with a negative body image.

But British researchers have discovered that even people who have never been exposed to these images can be convinced that skinny is best.

When people from two remote South American villages were shown pictures of slender catalogue models, it took only 15 minutes for them to change their view of female beauty. Men and women asked to create their ideal woman on a computer shrank her size after seeing the pictures.

Lead author Dr Jean-Luc Jucker, from the University of Durham, said: ‘Most women we see in the media tend to be very thin – below the UK average body size – and it is not realistic.

‘To attain that weight, you have to constrain what you eat to a level which may not be healthy. There have been studies showing these images have an impact on women’s health, leading to depression, eating disorders and anxiety.

‘But these results were surprising, that this effect could happen after such a short exposure time.’

Co-author Dr Helen Sharpe, from the University of Edinburgh, said: ‘It is very interesting to see that a brief, “lighttouch” exposure is enough to show a demonstrable change in body ideal.’

The villages visited were on Nicaragua’s Mosquito Coast, where few residents had been outside the area in eight months.