Real Girls, Real Pressure

Self-esteem has become a national crisis. Many little girls have a negative image about their body. They are disturbed and depressed by the way they feel about their body, looks, performance in school and relationships. Many self-hate themselves. These negativity pull down their self-esteem very much. So they start engaging in harmful and destructive behavior that can leave a lasting imprint on their lives.


Most common dangerous behaviors of girls with low self esteem:

• Eating disorder – starving, refusing to eat or over-eating and throwing up when feeling badly about themselves
• Bullying
• Smoking or drinking
• Talking badly about themselves
• Injuring themselves

Young girls need proper guidance and support.

The good news is that if parents and other role models are willing to create a steady conversation of encouragement, honesty and openness it can definitely help girls gain confidence and reach their full potential.

If we spend time giving girls new ways to think about beauty, body image and self-esteem it can make a real difference.

Dove is helping us parent to take our first step towards it. Dove has developed a program to provide the resources necessary to create positive change and ensure the next generation of young women grows up feeling good about themselves and appreciating their own unique beauty.

To ensure everyone has access to self-esteem resources, Dove has developed a range of powerful online tools, workbooks and facilitator training guides.

You can visit www.campaignforrealbeauty.com to download free self-esteem building tools for girls, moms and mentors including:

• True You and Mirror, Mirror booklets
• Interactive exercises
• Workshop Facilitator Guide DVD

I appreciate Dove’s every effort to pump up the self-esteem of our little girls.


For supporting this cause, Dove presented me 2 wonderful books

1.Life Doesn't Begin 5 Pounds From Now by Jessica Weiner


2.Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters by Courtney E.Martin

I am very honored as ever when I wear Dove’s gift T-shirt which says

“ you’re beautiful
pass it on”

It makes me keep my head held high to know I am doing my duty perfectly to bring up future little ladies brimming with self-confidence and courage…..


I have done mine, do visit www.campaignforrealbeauty.com and do your part too, as a fellow Mummy of Gals…

"The Women" Review

The Women is one movie of a rare kind. It is for women acted full and full by women. It would steal the hearts of all women. Every woman would definitely relate to any particular character in the movie. The storyline and the characterization are handled very well.

It is basically about friendship interwoven with all emotions. Mary is the lead role in the film. Meg Ryan has lived as Mary. Her performance is simply flawless.

Story – There are 4 close friends – Mary, Sylvie, Alex and Edie. Mary, the heroine is a fashion designer, wife of a famous Wall Street stockbroker, Steven Haines. Sylvie is a fashion magazine editor. Alex is an essayist while Edie plays as a caring mom in her fifth pregnancy.

These 4 friends meet, greet, gossip and share their emotions. They have a long time friendship. Mary works as a fashion designer for her father as well as devotes herself to family, cooking, gardening and charity works.

Mary invites her friends for a benefit luncheon. On the way to Mary’s house, Sylvie gets her manicure done at Saks. While trying to keep her client entertained, the manicurist tells about an affair between the perfume salesgirl and a Wall Street big shot which happens to be Mary’s husband.

Sylvie gets really disturbed to know about this. She is confused with emotional conflict whether to tell or not to tell Mary about this affair. Finally she lets it out to Edie and eventually to Alex. Somehow Mary also comes to know about this through the same manicurist by a twist of events.

Mary seeks her mom for help. Her mom sounds very knowledgeable and practical. She advises to get away from Steven for a while and make him think Mary is doing something incredibly interesting without him. So she invites Mary and her daughter Molly to her cottage.

Mary decides to brush it under the carpet and act to Steven as if nothing happened. But it doesn’t take long for the situation to go out of hand and they part. Mary laments and starts hating herself. Sylvie also betrays Mary in a career threatening situation. Mary feels so lost…

The way she overcomes these choking hardships and comes out in flying colors is the rest of the story…..

Several scenes are handled very realistically in the film. The friends meeting the perfume girl in Saks, cat fight in the lingerie store, graphic illustration of window shopping, Mary’s dialogue while eating butter dipped in cocoa powder, one on one conversation between Sylvie and the little girl are noteworthy.

Some lines are catchy – “I want a Pill to make love go away!”,” I am the man I want to marry “,”Florists and manicurist know everything”.

Overall it was an emotional comedy drama. Thanks to Dove for sponsoring 2 movie tickets to “The Women”. Dove has sponsored a gift bag with beauty products to encourage our support for its noble cause.

The bag is in brown color. Brown is all moms’ favorite color. Whites attract dirt just like magnet, black is too common, bored of seeing pink all the time on daughters, green, yellow and orange are very seasonal, light colors invite stains…….So moms love brown.

Dove has understood moms’ choice well. The bag matches well with my favorite outfits.

I have added the new products to my already stocked up Dove beauties……

Thanks Dove.

The Women

Today's post is about yet another wonderful venture of Dove. Regular readers of my blog must be knowing well about the Dove's Campaign for Real Beauty.

THE WOMEN

The Women is a fast-paced, witty and emotional look at all things female, including loyalties, betrayals, careers, families and most of all, friendships. A remake of the 1939 classic film, The Women features an all-female cast of distinguished actresses.

THE WOMEN BEHIND “THE WOMEN”

Dove worked with film director Diane English to create a short film called The Women Behind “The Women.” This short film follows 16-year-old teen journalist Cammy Nelson behind-the-scenes of The Women to learn, first-hand, how Hollywood creates the images we see on screen, highlighting the work and people involved in making a major motion picture come to life.

Visit Dove.com to :

1. View exclusive behind-the-scenes footage of “The Women” & The Women Behind “The Women”

2. Watch the exclusive mini documentary The Women Behind “The Women”

3. Read the Director’s Diary by Diane English

4. Go behind-the-scenes with teen journalist Cammy Nelson

5. Download self-esteem building tools for girls, moms and mentors

6. Enter for a chance to win one of 100 pairs of movie tickets per day between 9/3 and 9/19

For taking part in the beauty campaign and writing about it my blog, I was gifted with wonderful Dove Gift bag with beauty products and movie tickets to "The Women". Eager to have a look at the bag and review of the film.......Keep waiting...More photos of it in the next post.....

Under Pressure

Under Pressure

Girls today are under more pressure than ever.

They want to change at least one aspect of their physical appearance.

The books, magazines, TV shows, commercials show them the fake made up beauty. Young girls are forced to make-believe the “Picture Perfect Beauty”. Actually there is nothing like a “Perfect Beauty”.

After all, beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder. It’s the high self-esteem and confidence that carry & present out the beauty in anybody. Isn’t it?

Long hair or short hair, dark skin tone or fair, with braces or specks, with pimples or freckles…..it doesn’t matter. What matters most is what you think you are. Do young girls today think they are beautiful? Sadly, a majority don’t. They relate beauty with the cute looking fairies, flawless princess or gorgeous thin tall super models or actress with full make-ups. Is this what beauty is all about?

Come on, wait a second and take a look at this clipping.

Is this the beauty our young girls yearn for?

We parents should join hands with Dove to support it in its campaign for Real Beauty.

Keep building up the self-esteem and confidence of our dear daughters!!!

Dove – Celebrating Real Beauty !!!

Whenever I go out with my daughters, at least there are two strangers to greet them as "Cute doll" or "Beautiful Princess". Of course, kids are cute. But these compliments are mostly based on their looks. I agree that they cannot be praised for their intelligence or creativity in a 10-second interaction by a total stranger.
But still, why do people make empty praises with mere attention drawn to looks, hair or clothes? How do our kids realize that these are not Real Beauty?

Do we want the silly "Princess Syndrome" to operate unchecked on our young girls? On very basic level, princess stories are transformation tales. Many of them are about the turning of one kind of girl into something very different, which is still a common storyline in our fiction, whether in books, film or television.

Onslaught

A one minute video that details all the beauty and media imaging that young girls are inundated with within a 24-hour period.

Furthermore there is an aggressive marketing and merchandising campaigns of a huge array of beauty products which are creating and feeding an enormous appetite for transformation. Media also breeds cross-merchandising and that's earning a bundle for entertainment companies.


From a historical perspective, the transformation parallel has been there for centuries - but the merchandising associated with conglomeration has amplified its effect; now almost all of our little girls think that they are ugly. They worry too much about their looks maybe be their skin tone, freckles, hair or stature. They yearn for a transformation. They are unable to accept themselves as they are.

It is difficult for young girls to enter a toy store, fashion store or even a bookshop without being assaulted by beauty-related merchandise. Marketing industry canvases them to look slimmer, softer, tighter, younger and what not. As a result their self esteem decreases too much.

So it is now high time for us moms to talk to our dear daughters before the beauty industry does. We need to teach them true beauty lies within and not on the surface.

One of our culture's immediate visual signifiers is :

Beauty equals worthiness, success and popularity.

Ugliness equals worthlessness, failure and wickedness.

So make them understand what true beauty is. Now girls are questioning the world of beauty around them. Mom, now your daughters need you more than ever. Rise to the challenge!

Enter into girl world to learn what your daughter really faces. Things are more intense for a girl today than when you were her age. Your daughter is bombarded with media images that suggest how she should look and feel.

As a responsible mother, I have taken the first step by supporting the Dove Self-Esteem Fund. The Dove Self-Esteem Fund (DSEF) was established to raise the self-esteem of girls and young women to make them feel more beautiful and confident every day. The DSEF is part of the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty, a global effort designed to widen today's stereotypical view of beauty.

I was honored with the T-shirt and Dove products for taking up the challenge. Now I wear it proudly, as I celebrate my real beauty and help build the self-esteem in the next generation. You should do your part too……Get involved at www.campaignforrealbeauty.com

Play your role good as a concerned mom!!!