**1. Introduction**

This chapter examines the role of the mass media in the perception of beauty ideals and how those ideals, in turn, affect individuals' behavior and well‐being. The mass media play a criti‐ cal role in people's self‐image by informing and reflecting what people consider to be beau‐ tiful or attractive. One of the ways in which they do so is through the common use of very thin and attractive models in print and other media. Often termed the 'thin ideal', they com‐ municate the way people believe they should look in order to be attractive and desirable to others. There are different aspects of appearance about which the media can convey beauty ideals, including hair, skin, and facial features. However, we focus this chapter on how the

© 2016 The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. © 2017 The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

media convey messages about body weight and shape ideals. For women in Western culture, a very common attitude is that thinness is beauty. We review the literature on the role of mass media—both traditional media and newer, online media—and how they interact with psy‐ chological factors to impact appearance concerns and body image.

Body image is a multidimensional construct that refers to one's perception of and attitudes about the size and shape of one's body. It has both a perceptual component that refers to how we see our body size, shape, weight, physical characteristics, performance, and movement, and an evaluative component, which refers to how we feel about these attributes and how those feelings influence our behaviors [1]. Body dissatisfaction is experienced when someone perceives that their body falls short of the societal ideal in terms of size and/or shape, regard‐ less of that person's objective size or shape. In other words, body dissatisfaction is influenced not only by how we interpret societal ideals, but by how we perceive ourselves. Therefore, body dissatisfaction and perceptions of beauty are inextricably linked. Body dissatisfaction is the number one risk factor for a number of unhealthy behaviors, including clinical eating disorders and chronic dieting. Therefore, a delineation of the origins of body dissatisfaction is important not just for theories of perceptions of beauty, but for clinical and practical purposes.
