Media – films, television shows, magazines, and more recently, the Internet (i.e. self-written blogs and popular websites) are the main sources of lifestyle influence around the world.
At the dawn of the media age, the newspaper, popular magazines like Life, and TV allowed the general public glimpse lifestyles that before were only available to the imagination.
The rise of user-generated content is exemplified by the fact that anyone with Internet access can create a blog or an online journal, whether personal or commercial, which might detail someone's experience in a new restaurant, a purchased item of clothing or knickknack, or a review for a film.
"[3] Popular magazines and websites often focus on reporting these quick-fix celebrity health and beauty routines and forgo substantial research.
"In an attempt to communicate the merits of their product or brand," says Michael A. Kamins (New York University), "advertisers have often chosen to use endorsement as a promotional strategy."
"[4] Kamins explains that advertisers are well aware of how easily celebrities influence consumer habits; it is the combination of their physical appeal and their high status that draws in the public.
He writes, "Indeed, a considerable amount of research exists both in the social sciences and in marketing supporting a strategy by showing that a physically attractive source facilitates attitude change toward issues, products, and ad-based evaluations."
The match-up hypothesis "specifies that perceivers distinguish multiple types of good looks, and that in advertising, certain beauty ideals are more appropriately paired with specific products than with others.
For some individuals, a compromised identity structure may lead to psychological absorption (intensive and compulsive feelings) with a celebrity, or what has been termed 'intense-personal' attitudes.
In extreme cases, this absorption may become addictive, leading to 'borderline-pathological' attitudes and behaviours that serve to maintain an individual's satisfaction with the parasocial attachment."
They may believe that their physical attractiveness will bring them things equal to or similar to the celebrity's level of popularity and exterior happiness, and cosmetic surgery can help them attain this.
The study explains that "celebrities may represent prominent and unique social comparison targets, whose physical attractiveness and condition provide information about socially-idealised standards of beauty."
Celebrity worship makes people more prone to mental health problems such as high levels of neuroticism, anxiety, depression, and an overall strong sense of worry.
Being fixated on how a celebrity looks can increase anxiety because it causes the person to constantly compare themselves to them, thus creating excessive worry and high maintenance of their appearance, and eventually depression due to the fact that they cannot look like or be their role model.
Kellner states, "Media images help shape our view of the world and our deepest values: what we consider good or bad, positive or negative, moral or evil.
Celebrities promote their latest films, television appearance, favorite charities, self-endorsed items, and those who are subscribed to them remain in-the-know and are kept up to date of their glamorous, high-profile words.
Clothing stores update their pages with photos of their seasonal collections, showcasing attractive young models dressed in their fashions, thus creating images of desire in their impressionable audiences.
[9] Many television shows, music, and magazines aimed towards teens tend to be dominated by a certain type of highly sexualized content and imagery.