Justice for Beauty

This week in one of America's most popular fashion magazines, Elle, they published four different covers featuring some of America's funniest actors. These four actors are Amy Poehler, Zooey Deschanel, Allison Williams and Mindy Kaling. You may recognize them from their features on many popular sitcoms that I enjoy as well like New Girl, The Mindy Project, and Parks and Recreation. One difference that stands out to me immediately is that they are all body shots in color except for Mindy's picture which is neck-up and black and white. Mindy also happens to be the only ethnically diverse woman here because she is American Indian and she also is not model thin like the rest of the women. 

Commenters on the Elle website like Chinyere Echewe were outraged at Mindy's shot, saying, "Hey, Elle, I know you're only a fashion magazine, but perhaps you should have done Mindy the same justice you did the other ladies." She is so outraged she even questions the legality of this shot by calling justice into question and by saying Mindy deserves the "same justice," as the other girls by letting her true ethnicity shine through. I'm with Chinyere here because it seems like the editors of Elle went to great lengths with the black and white affect to make Mindy's different color skin blend in with the background, almost as if they are ashamed to present it to the public. 

Another commenter, Aisha Mapp, said, "Way to cover up the only normal sized person." The magazine cropped the photo very differently as well as if to hide Mindy's torso from the public because it doesn't fit in with their stick thin standards. One definition of "normal" is mentally and physically healthy and by Aisha calling Mindy "normal" she the calls in to question the other models in Elle   as being abnormal. Whether Aisha meant to or not, this is also making a stab at the fact that many of the average models in Elle are probably underweight and therefore not physically and mentally healthy. 

But in all honesty, the magazines are not responsible for this. The magazines print what the average American will buy and they feature in their magazines the type of woman who they think American's will take the most liking to and want to buy their clothes. This means that the standard of American beauty is specifically a white, stick thin photo shopped woman and we cannot blame the magazines for this because that is a problem deeper en-grained in our American society than we would like to admit.