Most fashion ads show beautiful, stick-thin models wearing flowing dresses and smiling seductively at the camera.

However, a fashion ad created by Italian fashion label Nolita only had one thing in common with other ads displayed during Milan's Fashion Week: The thinness of the young woman posing.
The ad pictured Isabelle Caro, a 27-year-old French actress, posing nude next to the words "No Anorexia." In the ad, her skin looks yellow and stretched tight over her bones, giving her an almost skeletal look.

The ad didn't promote a fashion line or a designer. It was created to promote awareness for the growing number of models suffering from eating disorders.

The campaign is backed by the Italian minister for health as well as multiple designers, including Dolce & Gabbana. Some have praised the advertisers for bringing the issue of anorexia in the fashion world out into the open, while others believe it could act as a trigger in some people already suffering from the disease.

Either way, the ad didn't just catch the attention of those at the show in Milan. It got people around the world talking about something besides belts, cardigans and tunics.

Anorexia is not just a problem for models in Milan; it affects people even at Penn State.

According to the Penn State Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS) Web site, if the proportion of persons with eating disorders among the American population is applied to Penn State's population, it can be estimated that 1,000 to 2,000 Penn State women and 50 to 200 men have severe eating disorders.

Nolita's ad may not change the face of the modeling industry, but even so it helped open the floodgates to open debate and discussion about anorexia, and opened at least one person's eyes to the severity of her own eating disorder -- Caro's.

After the picture was published, Caro said she wanted to recover from her illness and continue experiencing life.

Further, she hoped that her emaciated body would help dispel any "romantic" ideas young girls might have about the condition, according to The Daily Mail, a newspaper in the United Kingdom.

Sometimes, a picture really is worth more than a thousand words and we hope this ad will spark twice as many.