If you're reading this, you're beautiful. Whether you're a young person, an advocate, someone's mother, father or guardian, chances are you've strengthened your school, family or community. And it just seems appropriate to tell you that, right up front, in the spirit of New Moon Magazine's "We'll Show You Beauty Day."

An "Utterly Gorgeous" Assembly
People Magazine's 50 Most Beautiful People edition hit the newsstands this month. And on May 8, 2000, New Moon Magazine: The Magazine for Girls and Their Dreams countered with "We'll Show You Beauty Day," a celebration of media images that promote healthy behavior for girls and boys.

The day began with the unveiling in New York of an "utterly gorgeous" collage made up of the more than 800 drawings and photographs submitted to New Moon from people around the world. Each submission includes a brief description of why the person pictured—girl, boy, woman or man—is beautiful from the inside out.

"This is an activist expression of what beauty is, what's inside, the heart and creativity," says New Moon's Jacquelyn Jackson. "It's more than just stick-thin models or, for boys, the violence they see. They have as many dangerous media images as girls."

New Moon plans to send copies of the collage along with the message "We Know Real Beauty and Here It Is!" to the publishers of People magazine and media outlets.

Beautiful Girls Celebrate "Who We Really Are"
To further challenge the media's notion of beauty, New Moon Magazine's May/June issue features 25 "beautiful girls"—deliberately dropping the "most" to embrace a more inclusive definition of beauty, a definition that emphasizes good works, great hearts and activism.

"Girls and women in our country are offered such narrow definitions of beauty by the media," says Nancy Gruver, New Moon's founder and publisher. "We have selected 25 girls who care more about others than about the right shade of lipstick. These girls have a strong sense of who they are and are working to create a healthier world. They are an inspiration to us all."

Since January, New Moon Magazine's Girl Editorial Board (made up of girls ages 8-14) collected roughly 150 nominations for the "beautiful girls" issue.

Say editors Ana Grossman (age 12) and Carly Timm-Bijold (age 9): "Before we sat down to read the nominations, we watched a video that had media images of girls and women from only one week of television. It was scary and sad to see what the media is feeding us. Women and girls are portrayed as helpless damsels and men's playtoys or victims. It seems like the media doesn't care about who we really are—just about how we look."

Selecting the girls who will appear in the May/June issue of New Moon was no easy task, considering the candidates. So many "ordinary girls" are doing extraordinary things to make a difference in their community, in big ways and small. Marissa Nickelsberg, 13, is an aspiring writer who has published poetry in national magazines, including New Moon. When she was just eight, she sent money to Maine Won't Discriminate, a group defending the rights of gays and lesbians in her home state, with a letter saying, "I don't want to live in a state that thinks some people are better than others."

Jessica Growing Thunder Jiminez, 10, lives in California and has exhibited and sold beadwork she created. She's an accomplished powwow dancer, topnotch student and cares for an 87-year-old neighbor who suffered a stroke.

Heather Zapp, a 9-year-old from Colorado gives food and water to homeless people. She's excellent at bowling and soccer and regularly helps younger kids in neighborhood with their schoolwork. Her grandmother nominated her, calling her a "ray of sunshine and a friend."

And those are just three of them.

"It was very hard to chose only 25 girls from so many beautiful nominations," say Grossman and Timm-Bijold. "We looked for girls with a variety of ages and reasons why they were nominated. We wanted to get past girls being described as only 'kind, wonderful, selfless.' That description is as hard to live up to as having a perfect body."

The media's pernicious impact on girls has been much documented. But there are great programs that work to help girls retain their sense of self and reject media pressures and negative images. Education campaigns and groups like Girl Power! [1] and Dads and Daughters (DADs [2]) work to help girls shift the focus from how their body looks to what they—their minds, hearts and bodies—can do.

"We may be David taking on Goliath," says Nancy Gruver, "but it's time that we let it be known that these images must change. We are not talking censorship. If anything we want to crack open the narrowly drawn images of beauty and power portrayed in the media and let images of real people and caring behavior shine through."

So You're Beautiful, Now Get to Work!
To learn more about programs that work to help girls retain positive self-images and stay on track during the difficult transition to adolescence and adulthood, check out our Girls topic page [3]. There are many ways for you to get involved on behalf of girls in your family or community!

The New Moon Web site [4] has excellent links and resources, and offers New Moon Network, a magazine for adults concerned about girls. You can subscribe or read current issues on the site.

The Girl Power! site [5] also has useful links, resources, and a section for girls only.