BuzzFeed recently published an article where they recreated past and recent Sport Illustrated covers and showed how even though women come in different shapes and sizes, they are still beautiful. Personally, I love BuzzFeed for their cooking videos and social experiments - but I absolutely loved this recent article and video.

Growing up, our generation of young women have seen various magazine covers with actors, models, and athletes gracing their covers - we started idolizing over the models, wanting to be just like them when we grew up. We were told not to do worship them, but that is a hard thing to do at such an impressionable age. Lately, within social media, we have seen more and more "plus sized" models - models who happen to have a larger stature and are more engaged in modeling plus sized clothing. We have recently seen plus sized models arise like Tess Holiday, Whitney Thompson, Ashley Graham, Iskra Lawrence, and many, many more. These are the women we should be looking up to. They are pushing through the social norms that say that our generation of women have to have a specific bra size, waist size, face shape, and pant size, just to be considered beautiful or just to fit in.

BuzzFeed wrote that they "think it's very important for women of all different shapes, sizes, and colors to be represented and give an accurate depiction of what a beach body really is." Which if you think about what a beach body really is, it's just a body on a beach - AKA if you want to wear a bikini on a beach, go wear a bikini on a beach, own it and rock that beach like it's named after you!

This article and video focused on six different women, who happened to be all different shapes, sizes, and colors - just like how models should be if the industry wants an accurate representation of what "normal, average" women look like. Each woman in this project was hesitant and wasn't really sure how it was going to go, but once shown the final product each was in love with how they looked and would do it again. Each wished that society would have a better, more accurate representation of what a real woman looks like and that there isn't one out there that looks exactly like her. Each agreed that, as women, we should all accept that we are beautiful and sexy in our own ways and that we doesn't need society to confirm that.

With today's society, we are all starting to realize that "skinny" and "paper thin" shouldn't be the normal thing. Recently various challenges have been popping up, one of which being the "Paper Thin Challenge," where girls compare their body size to a piece of paper. In this challenge, you hold up a piece of paper to your stomach and if you can't see anything, then you'd be considered to be paper thin (see below image if this sounds confusing). Apart from challenges, there are various dieting options, that can become very dangerous, very quickly through losing weight faster than our bodies are used to. I know that losing weight or trying to eat healthy can be very difficult in today's world. Foods today are loaded with chemicals, food dye, and many other harmful things - sometimes the cheaper options (the ones most can afford) are the best options to go with because the work better with someone's budget. A lot of times the food that we can afford is cheap, so we can't get the fruits and veggies that many diets want their clients to be focusing on.

As women, we are all beautiful, elegant, stunning, classy, graceful, and incandescent in our own ways. If someone tells you that an outfit or makeup choice (or really anything) doesn't work for you, ignore them. If you want to wear blue eye shadow and red lipstick, then go on, wear those together and rock it, no one is stopping you. And ladies, please, please, please don't compare yourself to the models that you see on magazine covers or in online articles, they are most likely photoshopped and a lot more beautiful in person. Stay you, stay positive, and stay beautiful.