A new piece of research published in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence suggests online games that focus on appearance have an impact on how young girls feel about themselves. Endangered Bodies talked to Amy Slater, one of the primary authors of the study at the University of West of England about it all. Eighty British girls aged 8–9 years were randomly assigned to play an appearance-focused or a non-appearance focused game for 10 minutes. The girls in the appearance-focused group showed greater body dissatisfaction afterwards. "It’s quite concerning,” says Amy “that girls played these games for only 10 minutes and this made them feel bad about their bodies, or express a desire for a thinner body. So what does that say about the combined impact [of these messages] across a girl’s lifespan, across crucial developmental years?” Although this research did not study the effects games and apps with a specific cosmetic surgery focus can have, Slater said, “we can extrapolate from what our first study has shown in that if outwardly manipulating our appearance by changing a character’s hair colour, hair style and clothes makes girls express a desire to have a thinner body, it seems a logical next step that playing a game that encourages you to more permanently alter a character’s appearance also would not be good for how girls feel about themselves and their appearance.” Slater, who is also a mother, added, that as a parent, “you want to keep up-to-date with the changing nature of these apps; the apps and games kids want to play change regularly. However, you have to invest a significant amount of time to stay on top of what your kids are doing online. It’s fairly unrealistic to put the onus on parents to be able to police that.” We agree. Apple, Amazon and Google have an ethical and corporate responsibility to remove these games and have adequate policies in place to ensure they never re-appear. We will continue fighting for this until it is achieved. Many thanks for your ongoing support. Here is the full study: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10964-017-0659-7