The “Barbie and Ken Effect”, or why appearances affect our self-esteem so much

“I had a difficult time in school,” Tegan Martin told Australia’s Newcastle Herald in 2016.“I most certainly didn’t have model looks, and I was tangled up in a very draining group of friends in year seven to eight. I went through a stage where I didn’t want to go at all.” As a model in Paris, Martin said she suffered from “a period of extreme body confidence issues.”

For the record, Tegan Martin is a former Miss Australia.

Sadly, though, cases like this one are very common. That is, appearances matter–to a varying degree perhaps for different people, but enough to make a splash when it comes to first impressions (and second and third, for this matter), and on another level– to shaping our own sense of self-love and confidence.

But the culprit here is, of course, that the reflection we see in the mirror is often skewed– it’s bent through our individual prisms, and more often than not–it’s unfavorable.

Let’s face it–we live in a world which is very much obsessed with perfection; where outliers are still being penalised for their foibles– they are excluded from the “cool” circle or even worse–are bullied for…