Can thin-model debate have real-world effect?

Min notes that at least it’s a step. “For once, an establishment has set forth that there is something wrong with this,” she says. “Things may not change completely, but women may look and say, ‘maybe there’s something wrong with THEM, and not me.”’

That’s the message of an ad campaign from Dove, the beauty products company. Its “Campaign for Real Beauty,” launched in 2004, featured a one-minute video, hugely popular on YouTube late last year, of a nice-looking woman in her early 20s with uneven skin. She gradually transforms — through hairstyling, makeup and extensive photo-shopping — into a billboard goddess. “No wonder our perception of beauty is distorted,” the filmmakers note at the end.

Kathy O’Brien, Dove marketing director, says the campaign was created after a study commissioned by the company found that only 2 percent of thousands of women surveyed worldwide described themselves as beautiful. “Our mission is to make more people feel beautiful,” says O’Brien. She adds that the company, whose parent is Unilever, has seen a steady increase in market share since the campaign began, though she doesn’t give numbers. Another much-noted element of Dove’s advertising: print and billboard ads last summer featuring “real women,” of all shapes and sizes, posing in their underwear.

Tyra Banks, former supermodel and current TV host, didn’t pose in her underwear last week, but she came close: She opened an episode of “The Tyra Banks Show” in the same bathing suit that had just brought her a heavy dose of Internet grief, with paparazzi photos showing her looking heavier than usual.

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Banks used the incident to rebuke her critics. “I have one thing to say to you,” she said, her defiant tone suddenly turning into a teary shriek. “Kiss my fat ...” The audience leaped to its feet.

Drama aside, there was undeniable truth to Banks’ assertion that, given the names she’d been called — “America’s Next Top Waddle,” for example — she’d probably be “starving myself right now” if she had lower self-esteem, something she seems not to lack.

All that sounds familiar to Kearney-Cooke, the Cincinnati psychologist. Some of her younger patients have expressed a desire to look like the notoriously skinny Olsen twins — one of whom, Mary-Kate, herself underwent treatment in 2004 for an eating disorder. “They tell me, ’I’ll be popular if I can look like that,”’ says Kearney-Cooke.

“Our country needs to take this seriously,” she says, with a hopeful nod to both the current fashion debate and initiatives like the Dove campaign. “We need to widen the spectrum of beauty, so that these people can feel that they’re in that spectrum, too.”

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