Girl bands have been condemned for giving teenage girls a damaging idea of what a woman’s body should look like.

Watching videos of groups such as the Sugababes and Girls Aloud for only ten minutes can have the same detrimental impact on teenagers as seeing skinny catwalk models, researchers said.

The conclusions were part of a study into the impact of music videos, which shows that females aged 16 to 19 feel worse about their own bodies after seeing the performances.

Researchers said the singers “epitomised the ultra-thin beauty ideal for young women” and were damaging the way that their fans thought about themselves. The videos glamorised “unhealthy and unobtainable body ideals”.

“Music videos often feature scantily clad models whose dance movements further high-light the size, shape and proportions of their bodies,” the researchers reported.

“Among these idealised models are young women who epit-omise the female ideal of ultra-thinness, and who can function as aspirational role models for adolescent girls.”

Eighty-seven teenagers from a Roman Catholic girls’ sixth-form college in the North East took part in the research. A group of 30 watched the videos for ten minutes while the others were involved in control tests in which they either listened to the music without seeing the video, or were asked to memorise a list of words.

Among the girls who had watched the videos there was a noticeable rise in unhappiness about their bodies, according to the research, published in the journal Body Image. “The visual images in the music videos . . . raised girls’ body dissatisfaction significantly, whereas the music itself had no such detrimental effect,” the researchers from the universities of Leeds and Sussex reported.

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