This is one of those pieces of news that makes me feel hopeful, yet disdainful at the same time, resulting in a really weird expression that you probably wouldn’t want to see. Aveda, a brand that I purchased before I found out about more sustainable, green alternatives for my daughter, is now considering using “real women” as models rather than—well, I’m not really sure what the alternative to real women is. Robots? Air-brushed caricatures of women? I think models are real people too, after all, even if they’re starving and they always look as depressed as they must be when being denied things like cheese fries and bread.

Here’s the catch, though: Aveda wants to make sure enough of their clients are in favor of them using such “real” people (now I’m thinking all of their models must come from that Surrogates movie…), so they want us all to chime in on whether or not we’d rather see products on women greater than a size zero, or one women size zero or less. If you look at the models they use in this blog here, I must admit, most of them could really use a bowl of stew or something. As it’s Harry Potter season, I say we send them all to Molly Weasley’s house.

So yes, I think we should definitely encourage the company to use “real” women—particularly when the average woman in America is now a size 16. Having so many ads (and clothing sizes, no less) at such a smaller size really doesn’t make sense; can you honestly maintain that you are targeting your “target audience” when you’re actually targeting such underweight women? And do you really encourage such thinness—or deem it healthy or beautiful, the latter of which is part of your own mission statement? I don’t mean to come down on Aveda in particular, of course; every single industry needs to take a long, hard look at their ad campaigns and start adding in a little more human meat.

Of course, you have to “Like” Aveda on Facebook to make the comments, so this could just be another pathetic ploy to get people to follow them on Facebook, as so many other companies are doing these days. I am not a fan of doing that—“Liking” something when I really don’t, or to comment about something important to me, though I do know plenty of activists who do this. Still, I plan on writing Aveda in private to make the request, and it looks like you can contact them via Twitter if you want (though I don’t think 140 characters is really enough to make a very impressionable statement).

Aveda, if you really do want people to look and feel beautiful, you would support them the way they are, not show them images of what YOU think beautiful means and implying that they need to be more waiflike and bony in order to truly be pretty.  When you say people need to feel beautiful, do you really think that applies to your own models? Because I’m betting they don’t feel beautiful; they feel sick. And hungry.