Note to salespeople everywhere: If a customer doesn't ask for Spanx, do not suggest that they investigate Spanx.
This should be a given for women of all ages -- but when a department store employee offered the unsolicited advice to her teenage daughter, Megan Naramore Harris had to react.
Harris wrote a firmly worded letter on her Facebook page to the woman, starting it with,"Dear sales lady at Dillard's Towne East Mall."
Harris was taking her daughter shopping for an upcoming formal and had encouraged her to try on a long red dress, and though the teen wasn't interested, she put it on to humor her mother. "I told her how grown up it made her look and she smiled, and told me this made her look too old but still, she let me take a picture," Harris said in a now-viral Facebook post.
According to Harris, a saleswoman in the department then commented that in order for her daughter to wear that dress, she would need to wear Spanx underneath it.
In her post, Harris explained why these kinds of comments are so detrimental to young women. "I wish I had told you how many girls suffer from poor self-image," she wrote in the letter addressed to the saleswoman. "And telling them they need something to make them perfect is very damaging." Harris continued:
Girls of all ages, shapes and sizes are perfect because that is how God made them. If they feel good in a dress, that is all that should matter. My daughter is tall, she swims, runs, dances and does yoga. She's fit. She's beautiful. She did not need you telling her that she is not perfect.
Harris hopes that the post, which now has over 400,000 likes and 71,000 shares, will find its way to the saleswoman, "so that [she] should not say something like that to a girl ever again."
Harris signed the letter, ever so accurately, "Mother of a beautiful girl."
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