Skinny mirrors are being installed in change rooms near you.

In news that will shock approximately no one, it turns out that clothing stores are forking out the big bucks for “skinny mirrors” to flatter shoppers (and, you know, fool them into buying clothes).

If you’re a woman who has ever bought clothes from a shop, you will know that this happens all the freaking time.

Just last month I went shopping with my sister and it happened to me.

I tried on some clothes in the change room and everything looked great. But then, I got home. And somehow, I had magically gained 5kg since leaving the store. In all the wrong places.

Suddenly, my shiny new purchases didn’t look as flattering as they had a few hours before. And I was left feeling pretty deflated, to say the least.

This was my first reaction:

Which was shortly followed by this:

So it didn’t surprise me at all when I discovered that there is an actual company out there whose sole purpose in life is to create and sell these evil weapons of mass deception.

The Skinny Mirror company’s Facebook page says: “The Skinny Mirror uses curved glass offering a subtle slimming reflection, giving users a welcomed boost of confidence.” That’s right, folks – its creators claim this miraculous device helps to “empower” women.

Riiiight.

But wait. It gets better.

Because the company has the nerve to claim – wait for it – that the mirror will actually HELP people to lose weight though The Power of Visualisation and Instant (Visual) Weight Loss Gratification.

If you are thinking that sounds like a load of marketing hogwash designed purely to shill clothes – you’d be right!

But here’s where it stops being funny and starts making me really mad. These people say that the Skinny Mirror actually helps women to learn to love their bodies.

Image via The Skinny Mirror Facebook page.

They are claiming that deluding women and making them believe a lie, only to get home and realise it was all baloney, is a good thing. And I’m not buying it.

Because while the Skinny Mirror might make some people feel motivated and inspired and warm and fuzzy, it sure as hell doesn’t make me feel like that.

To me, it feels like a sneaky, exploitative way for brands to sell their clothes and make people feel pretty rotten about themselves in the process.

Exploiting women’s insecurities and body hang-ups for profit is nothing new, but it doesn’t make it ok. It’s a pretty nasty, insidious marketing tool.

As women, we’re confronted with a barrage of impossible beauty standards every single day. In every ad and magazine and movie we are shown an airbrushed, photoshoped image of ‘perfection’. It sucks, and it needs to change, but to a certain extent, we’re used to it.

But when it is our OWN image that starts to get warped? That’s seriously dangerous.

Because while most of us will be able to laugh off the Skinny Mirror as an annoying inconvenience, there will be plenty of those who can’t. Those with self-esteem issues or eating disorders, for example. And for those people? A bad experience with a Skinny Mirror could be devastating.

So from now on? I’ll be shopping online. At least it beats being sold a lie in the change rooms.

Do you think having Skinny Mirrors in shops is a good idea?

Next time you feel bad about yourself in (or out) of the change rooms, remember this…

What is a woman *supposed* to look like?

You.

We're all different.

There's no one-way to look

There is no right or wrong way to be.

The way women are portrayed in the media is not pretty - or rather, it's ridiculously pretty. ONLY pretty. And these days, impossibly pretty. Literally.

The types of women we see in fashion, advertising and magazines (tall, thin, usually blonde and anglo-saxon) comprise maybe 0.0005% of the population.

And then even this teeny, tiny fraction of women are deemed not good enough, needing to be 'improved' with photoshop.

When we ran the Mamamia Body Image Survey last year, only one in five respondents told us they were happy with the way they currently look.

Nearly a quarter of respondents told us that they couldn’t stand the way they look naked.

When we asked what impact body image had on their day-to-day life, 75 per cent of women said they had not worn certain clothes due to poor body image.

Is that good enough?

Absolutely not.

Instead of shouting about the fact there's something wrong with the media, we overwhelmingly turn our criticism inward and decide there's something wrong with us.

We're too fat, too thin, too tall, too short, too round, too straight, too old, too wrinkly, too freckled, too cellulite-y, too stretch-marked, too pale, too dark, too pigmented.....

And then we have surgery or contemplate it, we have botox, we go on ridiculous diets, we over-eat, we get depressed, we feel like crap.

How is any of this OK?

Is this normal?

Is this real?

What does it mean when a 13-year-old girl is not just considered an adult but the ideal physical representation of a woman?

New mothers are constantly guilted by the media into erasing every physical sign THAT THEY JUST GAVE BIRTH TO A HUMAN.

You know what the human body looks like after giving birth? It still looks pregnant. Like this.

And this.

These are the untouched, unfake breasts of a 33-year-old woman who has breast fed two children. This is what many many women see when we look in the mirror. And other than the mirror, it's extraordinarily rare to see other real boobs.

If there were more real boobs depicted in popular culture, perhaps more women would be happier with what they had.

Don't you think?

Women are sick of being lied to.

Literally, there are NO women in mainstream print media and advertising who are human.

And why do we passively accept it?