Who says one person can’t change the world? The notion has been refuted time and time again and an additional damning piece of evidence against the idea came out this week.

14 year old Julia Bluhm started a petition on change.org asking Seventeen Magazine to stop photoshopping images of young women in the magazine. The petition gained ground steadily and a protest outside the magazine’s offices got noticed. What they wanted Seventeen to commit to was publishing just one photo a month that was not photoshopped or enhanced.

Julia and her supporters received a commitment to do more than that. According to numerous media outlets, including this report from CNN, the Editor-in-Chief of Seventeen Magazine now vows to never change or alter the faces or bodies of the models they depict in their pages. I’ll not inundate you with the details, you can read all about that on your own, including taking a look at the Body Peace Treaty the editor published.

Why is this on Simple Black Coffee today? Because, quite simply, I feel this is a victory for truth and honesty in the consumer world. We are barraged by advertising and messages every day telling us that we can be a better, prettier person if we’d just do this or do that, buy this or buy that. As the parent of a teenage girl I’ve often thought about how the messages in these magazines might make her feel. She’s a confident person, but even the most stalwart amongst us can feel pressure to change something if we’re told we’re not good enough the way we are. She receives these magazines in the mail and perhaps I can now feel better that at least one of these teen digests is a bit more realistic. I may be overly optimistic and too idealistic in my thinking, but I sincerely hope it’s a first step in what could become a trend in fashion magazines.