Influencing and Conditoning Body Image views

For my essay, I thought I would look into how things such as Barbie dolls start affecting children at a young age, creating body ideals that stick with them throughout life (the idea that attractive is to have blonde hair, blue eyes, and a small but curvy figure). Here are the websites I used whilst looking into this:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7920962.stm
http://www.teen-beauty-tips.com/barbie-body-image.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/you/article-1158948/Things-don-8217-t-know---Barbie.html

I also used my AQA A2 psychology textbook to look into the way things such as television influence peoples perceptions. Through this, as well as what we learned about advertising in class, I found that television typically portrays women as younger than they actually are supposed to be, and so this can lead to an unrealstic ideal of what a women in her 40's for example should look like.