No one is born with the instinctive sense of what builds beauty and the ideal shape of the body. Instead, we are introduced to a world that teaches us to embody the cultural standards of beauty that we must adhere to. The average teenage girl spends a lot of time watching TV shows and commercials filled with ideals of thinness. Therefore, television presents a considerable amount of information and images that suggest what we should look like in order to succeed in life and be popular. They are very vocal when it comes to imposing thin ideals on young women, but seem silent when it comes to the negative effects. This article was written to explore the relationship between television viewing and young women's perceptions of their bodies. In every house there is an unknown intruder lurking, just waiting to contaminate the minds of young women. The intruder is square in shape and measures between 10 and 73 inches. This intrusive squatter I'm talking about is none other than your television box. In the United States, the average adolescent watches approximately 20,000 television commercials per year (Gentile and Walsh, 1999). That being said, we never realize how much time we spend or how the content we view affects us. Let's be real, televisions are everywhere; in our homes, in stores and sports bars. The fact is that television is the most popular form of mass media and that is because it is the most popular, the most accepted and the most convenient. Companies exploit and use television as an outlet to market their products; they see TV commercials as an elaborate gateway that allows more and more companies to buy artificial beauty augmentations in order to gain financially. W...... middle of paper ......rtising, 23(2), 49-64.Monro, F.B. and Huon, G. (2005). Idealized images, body shame, and appearance anxiety presented by the media. International Journal of Eating Disorders, 38(1), 85-90.Barrie, G. (2012). Media and appearance. The Oxford Handbook of Appearance Psychology, 455-467. Bessenoff, G.R. (2006). Can the media affect us? Social comparison, self-divergence, and the thin ideal. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 30, 239-251.Yamamiya, Y., Cash, TF, Melnyk, SE, Posavac, HD and Posavac, SS (2005). Women's exposure to thin and beautiful media images: Body image effects of ideal media internalization and impact reduction interventions. Body Image, 2, 74-80. Posavac, HD, Posavac, SS and Posavac, EJ (1998). Exposure to media images of female attractiveness and concern about body weight among young women. Sex roles, 38(3/4), 187-201.