From the runway to magazines to billboards, young women and girls are often bombarded with images emphasizing outer beauty.
Yet a disturbing addition to the body image trend has many people both outraged and concerned; plastic surgery apps targeting girls as young as 8 or 9.
“Hey, here’s a cartoon. Give it plastic surgery,” Jessica Yvonne of Marlton, New Jersey, said. “That’s appalling!”
The often free apps feature kid-friendly cartoons and super hero themes and allow users to inject and give surgery to digital subjects.
“The apps that I was able to really pull up and see actually have, like a scalpel,” Board Certified plastic surgeon Dr. Steven Davis told NBC10.
Dr. Davis warns that the apps can promote unrealistic expectations.
“The patient does become a little bit overzealous, if you will, with what they think they can really achieve,” Dr. Davis said.
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Yvonne doesn’t allow her daughter, who’s in the 6th grade, to download the apps.
“They all talk about their lips. They all want the ‘Kylie’ lips,” she said. “What? You know you’re 11.”
Esma Cakmak, 10, of Haddonfield, told NBC10 she also doesn’t use the apps.
“There’s all those drawing and there’s like those big lips which really creep me out,” Cakmak said. “Surgery is also very painful. Because it takes a long time to heal and you’re in all those bandages.”
Emily Smith, a teen girl, said she plans to monitor her younger sister’s app store activity.
“I just don’t want them getting in their heads that they should be changing anything about themselves,” Smith said.
The apps are not new. Many disappear from the app store before resurfacing. That's why worldwide watchdog and advocacy groups are standing together with mothers who started the #SurgeryIsNotaGame hashtag to hold the creators of the apps accountable.
Dr. Davis also has a message to anyone who uses the apps. Making changes to your body is not as easy as a download. It’s painful and permanent.
“It’s not like you rub something on it and make a magic wish happen and all these fairy dust kind of comes down and a person looks different," he said.
Teen therapist Sarah Temel says peer pressure among teens to change their bodies causes deep anxiety and depression.
"There's a lot of comparing, especially I feel like with social media, they see these beautified images of their peers even," Temel said.
While Temel is disappointed by the plastic surgery apps, she's not shocked.
"I feel that companies do have a moral and social obligation to try and promote things that are helpful for society," she said.
At the Mindful Soul Center for Wellbeing in Audubon, New Jersey, Temel promotes strong self-esteem and positive body image.
She advises parents to praise their children for non-physical attributes, such as being kind, generous and smart, and to teach them self-love by focusing on health over appearance.
"Building up the self-esteem," Temel said. "Building up the self-compassion. So being kind to yourself."
Temel also recommends limiting or managing what your children post on social media. While selfies, for example, can boost self-esteem, children should not be measuring themselves by an outpouring or lack of endorsement online.
Temel's biggest message for parents is for them to be good examples for their children.
"The best thing that we can really do is to model for our kids," she said. "We might think that they're not watching us and they don't see how we're talking about our own bodies. But they're watching and they're taking it all in."
Esma Cakmak put it simply.
"Stay the way that you are," she said. "You're perfectly fine."
