Earlier this month, we wrote about eighteen-year-old Jamie Keiles’s project — following all the advice in the June/July Seventeen. Now she’s done — and we chatted with her about makeup, advertorials, and how the Internet gives her hope.
Keiles followed Seventeen‘s tips — and blogged about it — from late May until her high school graduation last week. She wasn’t a big fan of the magazine to start out with, calling it a “guilty pleasure” of her earlier teen years — but over the course of the month, she says, “I just felt so boxed in that like instead of this being a pleasure, it just became guilty.” She mentioned that the magazine offered “a really limited idea of the right way to do things,” one often informed by whatever brands it was trying to push. Watch out, editors, this teen is onto you:
They are not only directly advertising to kids and teenagers in the form of explicit, actual advertising, but now they’re kind of subtly saying, we’re going to give you all this non-biased advice, but it’s all advertising, so that just kind of bugged me.
Keiles said that reading the magazine so much might have influenced her to “put that extra mascara in the basket” at the drugstore, but mostly she went the other way. During the project, she started wearing her hair naturally curly more often, rather than straightening it, and she found herself especially disgusted by the magazine’s makeup recommendations. She explained, “the idea that when I wake up in the morning I have to just have to pack all this foreign crap all over my face, it just doesn’t really make me feel that attractive.”
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