Tess Holliday made the cover of People magazine. I don’t usually buy People. Everything I want to read is available online. Plus, I can’t keep up with my monthly magazines. Taking on a weekly would have me buried alive.
Oh, and I have made a conscious effort to stop bringing magazines into the house featuring itty bitty (Photoshopped?) celebrities that will make my 14-year-old daughter feel even worse about herself. Like most young teens – like most females in general – she struggles with body image issues.
And that’s exactly why I had to buy People with Tess Holliday on the cover. I wanted her to see a major magazine has realized what I’ve been telling her all along – that beauty comes in all sizes, shapes, skin tones, etc.
I casually left it on the kitchen counter. It didn’t take long for her to see it.
- “There’s a chubby girl on the cover of ‘People’!”
- “I can’t believe someone who is chubby like me got to be on the cover of a magazine!” (I’ve never called myself, her or anyone else chubby, but this is still how she identifies herself. And she’s really not.)
- “Oh, she’s so pretty!”
- “She looks so strong and confident!”
- “Those are cool shoes.”
- “Her makeup is perfect.”
- “I like that dress.”
- “She looks like Shailene Woodley with her hair down.”
I loved hearing how her thoughts went from shock to just acceptance. At first, she was surprised to see someone who isn’t the typical model on the pages of a magazine. But as she flipped through, her comments turned to admiring her makeup, hair and clothing just like she would with any model on the pages of a magazine.
EXCEPT she didn’t feel like crap about herself afterwards.
She loves fashion – shoes, clothes, hair, nails, makeup, all of it. She likes flipping through magazines and circling the things that strike her fancy. But after a few pages, she falls into a funk.
“They are so skinny. Those clothes wouldn’t look good on me. I’m too fat. They probably don’t even come in my size.”
And then the magazine goes down and she retreats into herself.
None of that happened when she looked at Tess Holliday.
Thank you Tess and People. We need more non-typical models.