Shelley Leith is the author of the new book, Head-to-Soul Makeover, Helping Teenage Girls Become Real in a Fake World, and co-author of Character Makeover: 40 Days with a Life Coach to Become Your Best You. She lives in Southern California with her husband and their five children, who have been the targets of Shelley’s early attempts at character development exercises.

Head-to-Soul Makeover. The name sounds like another study for teen girls on self-esteem.

My daughter Heather came up with that name. This study is based on my book for women called Character Makeover, but Heather told me that teenagers would not show up for a study with the word “character” in the title, so she gave it this clever twist. It’s actually a ten-week study on how to develop eight different Christlike character qualities, and I use television reality shows as metaphors for the different qualities.

It's common knowledge that fashion magazines touch up photographs of models. If this is news to you, I'm sorry to have to break this to you; the faces you see on covers of magazines in the check-out counter at the grocery store are no more real than cartoon characters. Jennifer Anniston really isn't that thin. The Kardashian cheekbones don't look like that in real life. Images in fashion magazines are conjured by artists, manipulated and carefully sculpted to deliver a message - mainly that you will never look like this but, you should try as hard you can to.

The process a model goes through to be deemed photographable and the subsequent manipulation of the photograph are well documented in this video that Dove did as part of it's Campaign for Real Beauty several years ago.