The Pressure to Look “Perfect”: Social Media’s Impact on Teenage Girls

Social media use can contribute to lower self-esteem in teenage girls by encouraging unhealthy comparisons and exposure to unrealistic beauty standards. Growing up, we’ve all looked at a celebrity and compared ourselves to them—seen them as “Perfect” or have asked, “What can I do to look like her?” Currently, this is something that adolescent girls struggle with every day when scrolling on social media apps like TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, and Facebook.

Amanda Raffoul, an instructor at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said, “The more teenage girls are on social media and are exposed to image-based social media in particular, the more likely they are to have poor body image.” This can cause high expectations of beauty standards, which they might feel they need to meet. Raffoul also added in the article, “If you’re constantly bombarded with those images, it is going to alter your perceptions of yourself in some way, especially when you’re in adolescence”.

According to a 2022 Pew Research Center study, 66% of adolescent girls use TikTok, compared to 59% of boys, showing that these platforms hold a bigger influence over girls. This heavy social-media use intensifies feelings of pressure among adolescent girls. Social media’s algorithms play a huge role in this when it comes to affecting how adolescent girls perceive themselves. If a teenage girl is constantly interacting with TikTok about beauty standards, the app’s algorithm will continue to show her more of these videos, making it more overwhelming for her. We’ve all taken numerous selfies of ourselves and deleted most of them because we didn’t like the way we looked, but what we fail to realize is that social media apps can track when we delete our pictures.

Sarah Wynn-Williams, a Facebook insider, mentions how Facebook, now called “Meta,” was tracking when a teenage girl would delete a selfie of themselves. Subsequently, a beauty ad would be shown to the user. This is especially harmful for younger girls. If a teenage girl has been interacting with videos of girls with what they think is a “perfect” body looks like, and deletes pictures she has of herself, she could start seeing ads pop up for weight loss injections, gyms, or fitness tips. Adolescent girls need to be reminded that not everything they see on social media is always real. Social media is a place where everyone shows the good side of themselves, not what they struggle with. If adolescent girls understood this more, or had a space where they could speak to someone and improve their confidence, it could help them overcome these negative feelings.

A great example of what could be done to combat this problem is having more companies, like the brand Dove, which has created the “Self-Esteem Project.” They offer a 45-minute virtual class for schools and youth groups, where they help younger audiences build body confidence and self-esteem. According to Dove’s “Self-Esteem Project” website, this project has reached over 137,000,000 young people since 2004. This project is a way to teach adolescent girls to love themselves and to improve their self-esteem. If teenage girls feel confident about themselves, the algorithm wouldn’t bring them an overwhelming feeling. 

Although social media can be useful for connecting with others and posting to update our friends, it can be a very harmful place, especially for adolescent girls who are very vulnerable to this. If we want adolescent girls to grow up feeling good about themselves and know that they don’t have to look a certain way to feel “beautiful” or “perfect”, we must create solutions to fix this issue and help them overcome the negative feelings that social media brings when scrolling. When girls love themselves and have good self-esteem, the issue of comparing themselves on social media stops. Adolescent girls can start seeing themselves as beautiful, no matter the filters or the pressure social media brings.