There are many challenges to face for young people on their way to adulthood. One of the biggest challenges is connected to appearance-related pressures. We are living in a society where good appearance is a responsibility and can be assumed that this atmosphere is feeding appearance-related pressures and other extreme phenomena such as eating disorders, use of doping and plastic surgery addictions. There is a connection between the image of being thin created by the media and the ideal body image in younger people.

The study was started by examining gender roles in our society and what is seen as masculine or feminine. Based on the material it was also created a so-called general view on an ideal body image. In this thesis the main focus was on different sources of appearance-related pressures and extreme phenomena caused by the media. Also topics such as image processing and features typically attached to obesity are introduced more closely in the thesis.

The data was collected from students studying in high school in a municipality with less than 4500 inhabitants. The purpose of this thesis was find out whether high school students have appearance-related pressures because of media catalogues (mostly footage) and whether prospective pressures have had some effects on their body image. Furthermore, it is considered whether dominant standard of beauty ideal has an impact to students’ thoughts about an ideal body image.

It seems that girls considerably more often suffer from beauty pressures because of the media than boys: 51 % of girls and 26,3 % of boys had felt pressures. The students named the media’s perfect ideal of men and women as the biggest source of pressure. According to the results of the thesis boys living on countryside are remarkably satisfied with their appearance than boys nationwide. However, boys in the countryside and boys living in the city area both consider a “too skinny” body as a problem. The results show that 60 % of boys think that they need more muscles in order to look good.