SALT LAKE CITY — A 14-year-old girl is petitioning Seventeen magazine to stop airbrushing photographs of models in an effort to help teenage girls realize they do not have to meet unrealistic standards to be beautiful.

Julia Bluhm, of Waterville, Maine, created a petition two weeks ago on Change.org calling on Seventeen to commit to printing one unaltered photo spread per month.

"Those ‘pretty women' that we see in magazines are fake," Bluhm wrote. "They're often photoshopped, air-brushed, edited to look thinner, and to appear like they have perfect skin. A girl you see in a magazine probably looks a lot different in real life."

She was inspired by girls in her ballet class, who she said often said they felt they were having a "fat day," or that "I ate well today, but I still feel fat." Their self-esteem was not helped by unrealistic pictures in magazines, she said.

"I want to see regular girls that look like me in a magazine that's supposed to be for me."

The petition has received nearly 49,000 signatures and led Bluhm to be invited to Seventeen's headquarters to meet with editor-in-chief Ann Shoket. Bluhm gathered with her mother and several members of the Spark movement in front of Hearst Tower to stage a mock photo shoot before the meeting.

Spark is a national activist group aimed at fighting gender inequality.

'We're proud of Julia for being so passionate about an issue - it's exactly the kind of attitude we encourage in our readers - so we invited her to our office to meet with editor in chief Ann Shoket this morning," Seventeen said in a statement.

Seventeen did point out that, contrary to one charge in the petition, the magazine does not alter the body types of the girls who appear within its pages, and it features a broader variety of body types and sizes than is typical in the magazine industry.

Shoket agreed to stay in touch with Bluhm's group, although she made no promises about a clean photo spread and would not comment on Seventeen's photo-editing practices. But Bluhm hopes her fight will continue to help girls to realize they do not have to resort to unhealthy behavior to try to meet an impossible standard.

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"Girls want to be accepted, appreciated, and liked," she said. "And when they don't fit the criteria, some girls try to ‘fix' themselves. This can lead to eating disorders, dieting, depression, and low self esteem."

Or in some cases, calls for attention that threaten already-damaged self- esteem, as was the case for some teenage girls who earlier this year took to posting videos of themselves on YouTube, asking, "Am I pretty, or am I ugly?"

"Putting all of your stock in that, 'Oh ok, this is where I'm going to get my self-esteem is people telling me I'm pretty,' and they don't tell you that, then that's a trap," Julie Hanks, with Wasatch Family Therapy, said at the time.

That is the attitude Bluhm and countless other girls will continue to fight as they face a world that too often tells them they have to fit within narrowly prescribed boundaries to be considered beautiful. It is something she wants to change.

"We have the power to fight back," she said.

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