Keep It Real Campaign
Remember brave 14-year old SPARK activist Julia Bluhm? She started a change.org petition asking Seventeen magazine to publish real images of girls and women in a magazine that is supposed to be for girls like her. The request was small - just one unphotoshopped picture of a model per issue, but Seventeen magazine refused.
Inspired by her initiative, SPARK Summit, LoveSocial, I am that girl, Bodies Endangered, and Miss Representation banned together to create the three-day Keep It Real challenge to encourage magazines to pledge to Julia’s request.
On the first day of the challenge, June 27, people are encouraged to Tweet about the campaign to raise awareness of the issue so that magazines know how limiting their photoshopped standards of beauty really are. The Keep It Real official toolkit published the Twitter tags of prominent magazines and their editors, with sample tweets such as, “Hey @Vogue we’d love you to #KeepItReal by celebrating women’s natural beauty - including pores and freckles!” included for inspiration.
On the second day, Keep It Real challenges people to blog about why they want to see real images of beauty in magazines. And on the third day, people are encouraged to “Capture it” by using the hashtag #KeepItRealChallenge to share photos on Instagram of what they consider to be REAL beauty. The winner will even get the chance to be on a NYC billboard!
So take up the challenge! And demand that magazines depict realistic and healthy images of models in their magazines. There’s too much at stake not to.
