Birmingham's beautiful bodies?

Stacey Collins

If I asked you to guess which city had been reported to contain the best female bodies I’d expect you to be imagining Paris, Milan, London. If I added that the city with the ‘best body’ figures in England has also been voted the city with the worst accent by a BBC survey, is home to Cadbury World and the infamous Spaghetti Junction and has produced the likes of Toyah Wilcox you would probably be a little shocked once you realised it was the Midlands city of Birmingham.
It seems that the Brummie lasses have resisted the temptation of Cadbury World and maintained slim figures.

The nationwide store Debenhams analysed the sales of underwear and nightwear across the country and came to several conclusions. They stated that the high sales of push-up bras in Preston and Redditch implied that they had the smallest chests, Sheffield women had the largest bottoms and that Birmingham has the highest proportion of size 10 women. I wonder how many other cities Debenhams can offend with their ‘figures’.

Do size 10 figures really signify a fantastic body though? Should women be concerned if they don’t adhere to the unrealistic projections of a perfect body that magazines portray as being ideal? Much has been done to combat the unhealthy body images that magazines say are attainable by exercising 25 hours a day or by following a nut and raisin diet, a diet which I’m pretty sure doesn’t consist of gorging on Cadbury Fruit & Nut bars either.

It was the Dove adverts that famously decided to represent real beauty by exhibiting a defiance against the fashion and beauty industry with their any shape or size ‘models’. There have been questions as to whether Dove’s campaign for real beauty was a sincere attempt at reforming the advertising world or a cunning bid to differentiate from the thousands of other beauty brands in the market. However, despite the brands’ link with Lynx, a company that some believe have reversed gender equality back several decades through the sexualising of women, and the figures that reveal that the brand has increased its sales by 30 per cent as a result of the adverts, Dove have set the 'real beauty' ball rolling. Since then, celebrities have begun to do photo shoots without the unrealistic and in most cases, unattainable post-Photoshop bodies and plus size models have become more of a permanent feature on catwalks and in magazines.

So who cares if Barnsley has the biggest bottoms or if Taunton has the tiniest tummies, let’s celebrate who we are, guts and all.