Teen review: Hungry by Crystal Renn

My name is Jenna. I go to a high school where I’m part of the marching band and the cheerleading squad. I’m pretty busy, but I always find time to read. I’m also very creative and I like doing little crafts out of random things I find.

Hungry by Crystal Renn

Crystal Renn is one of the most famous plus sized models today. But, she went through a lot to get there.

At just fourteen years old, she was approached by a modeling scout and told her she could be a supermodel living in New York at just one condition; she had to lose weight. This one scout, on that one day, is what caused Crystal to become anorexic.

Being skinny is the only thing Crystal cared about. She once had a brilliant mind with great ideas, but she lost all of her knowledge when she became dangerously skinny. Inevitably, Crystal began to gain weight, despite her frantic workouts and absence of eating. The modeling agency didn’t want a “fat model”.

It was then that Crystal Renn had an epiphany but decided that she loves modeling too much to let it go. So she becomes a plus-sized model. She gained weight and is now at her normal and healthy size, and she couldn’t be healthier.

All throughout this memoir, Renn bestows her knowledge about bodies, models, and society. Everything that she says is so true, and she has a way of making you want to take her advice. This book has to the ability to completely change your outlook on the human body. I absolutely recommend this book if you want an inspirational read.

Teen review: Smile For the Camera by Kelle James

My name is Jenna. I go to a high school where I’m part of the marching band and the cheerleading squad. I’m pretty busy, but I always find time to read. I’m also very creative and I like doing little crafts out of random things I find.

Smile For the Camera by Kelle James

This book was a memoir of Kelle James. She starts out as her being at the tender age of sixteen, already making huge life decisions.

Kelle was not an average sixteen year old. At this age, she decided to break away from her abusive father and her country lifestyle to travel to New York City to pursue a modeling career. All on her own.

When she gets to the Big Apple, she is overwhelmed to say the least. She’s not used to the perverted remarks and the rudeness of people. She is left with nowhere to live and struggling to find cash.

As soon as Kelle meets Rayna, they become friends instantly. Living in at least five different places together, they experienced the scariness of New York City. They met an owner of a modeling agency named Buddy, and became fast friends with him. Kelle confided in Rayna about her disgusting “boyfriend” Lloyd, who took advantage of her. Kelle stayed with Lloyd because she thought that as long as she wasn’t getting beaten, like from her father, that it was okay for Lloyd to treat her however he wanted.

Pretty soon, Kelle and Rayna got separate apartments and each got steady jobs. Rayna, as a furniture salesperson, and Kelle booking modeling jobs left and right.

As if Kelle and Rayna didn’t have enough of their plates, they both got wrapped into a murder mystery. Their good friend Buddy has been accused of murder. Now, Kelle is constantly being followed by reporters and everyone in the city knows her name.

This memoir is very surprising. Kelle is very inspiring to me, because she was able to get out of an abusive home life and able to move away and only sixteen years old. All of the horrible things that happened to Kelle make me wonder how she was able to stay strong. This is a good story about finding strength when you feel like nothing is going right in your life.

I know October is all about skeletons, but this is ridiculous.

images from flickr users perpetualplum and andre-batista

I don’t know how many of you have seen the Ralph Lauren advertising images currently causing a ruckus, but you must click to believe! The models’ heads are wider than their waists.

Coverage in: Photoshop Disaster

Shine blog at Yahoo!

The New York Times’ Ethicists asks: “Should Photos Come With Warning Labels?”

Not only are the photo-illustrations laughably not images of real human bodies, one of the models has said that she was recently fired from her contract for being too fat. Blogs posting pictures of the images were sent letters of warning from Ralph Lauren’s lawyers saying they were violating copyright and not covered under Fair Use laws.

It’s a widely-accepted view that most of the images in magazines these days went through some kind of manipulation. To me, that’s what is kind of funny about Ralph Lauren’s images. Everyone more or less accepts that they’re not being shown the truth. It’s kind of working against the brand to be so obvious about it–who is really going to covet a body type that can’t physically exist without the surgical shaving of hipbones? (Besides the sadly real need for “thinspiration” among those afflicted by anorexia.) The fact that Ralph Lauren then made a fuss about criticism of the images and wanted them pulled from blogs makes it even more absurd to me!

Sure, it’s insulting that those images ever got approved as a reflection of what the public wants to buy–and advertising is very often aimed at teenagers, whose income is, in most cases, disposable and will go towards new clothes, music, video games, etc.–but I think it’s much more dangerous when the subtler works of Photoshop slip by. For every obvious retouching scandal like Kelly Clarkson’s Self Magazine cover or Andy Roddick’s new biceps on the cover of Men’s Health, what else is slipping by and making you think “maybe it is Photoshopped, but only a little… why can’t I look that good?”

This debate, like the debate on whether only models of a certain Body Mass Index should be allowed on the runway, seems poised to go on and on without end. It always provides a fascinating debate on what advertisers think people want to see, what people say they find fashionable, and how the images we see all around us affect how we see ourselves.

FURTHER READING:

Made you look : how advertising works and why you should know by Shari Graydon: A primer on the mechanics of advertising

So Yesterday by Scott Westerfeld : The author of the Uglies series tells the story of a kid who is paid by corporations because he knows what will be trendy before it is trendy. When one of his friends disappears, he tries to solve it and discovers “consumer conspiracy”.