Office of Communications (Ofcom) (return to blog) Blog

Channel 4 have launched a new website, 4Beauty (www.channel4.com/4beauty) which focuses on celebrating positive body images - aiming to give women the tools and confidence to celebrate their bodies, regardless of size and shape. With a strict policy not to feature any air-brushed images, and to use real women for fashion shoots rather than models, the 4Beauty site will feature fashion, beauty and health advice for women of all ages, backgrounds, races and lifestyles.

The site will provide in-depth information and useful web tools aimed at getting to the truth behind the marketing claims and airbrushed models of the beauty industry. 4Beauty forms part of Channel 4’s ongoing commitment to challenging traditional concepts of ‘beauty’ and encouraging women to feel better about their body image. It accompanies the launch of the new series of How To Look Good Naked, in which Gok Wan will take his campaign against air-brushing into the nation’s schools. In the programme Gok and Shona Collins, the winner of Channel 4’s ‘Miss Natural Beauty’ campaign, devise a classroom workshop to promote understanding of how media images affect young people’s perceptions of body images and encourage students to talk about how they feel about their own bodies.  

Channel 4 has also recently launched the latest series of Battlefront, its award-winning campaigning project in which teenagers are encouraged to use social networks to raise awareness of issues they are passionate about. The new series features 17–year old Kaya Chayanne leading a campaign to promote natural beauty and change mainstream media’s portrayal of female bodies.

Later on in the year audiences will have an opportunity to explore for themselves the way photographs and adverts in magazines are airbrushed and adjusted with the launch of the educational media literacy game Covergirl. Part of Channel 4’s educational slate aimed at teenagers, players will be charged with ’enhancing’ the photos to be used in a fictional fashion magazine, encouraging them to understand the methods that magazines and advertisers use to sell beauty products.