Selling the Fantasy
Oct 20th, 2007 by lisa
This is over a year old. I don’t know how I missed seeing it. Maybe it didn’t get much airtime.
This is a good demonstration of the power of makeup and special effects. Paul and I were in Barnes and Noble the other day, noticing how the actress-of-the-week on the cover of some magazine looked nothing like herself. These days, it isn’t enough to have a makeup and lighting crew in a photo shoot. It is now standard procedure to run the finished images through Photoshop untill the subject is transformed into some arbitrary standard of beauty.
It is part of Dove’s “Real Beauty Workshop for Girls“. Many of the rebuttals that I’ve seen to this film completely miss the point. One response was ‘thank god for our false perceptions, because no one wants to look at ugly people’. Nice. This implies that the young woman in the ad was ugly before the transformation. In fact, she was more beautiful at the beginning. Her face was alive, and her features unique and human, before she was transformed into yet another a soulless mannequin used to sell cosmetics. From human to inhuman, from real to fake, from the truth into a lie. Is this the standard of beauty today? Unfortunately, yes it is.
The point is no matter how good, kind, strong, smart and beautiful we actually are, the advertisers want us to believe otherwise so they can sell us something. As each new product arrives, the advertisers need to raise the bar just a little higher, so we feel compelled to buy their product. We have now reached the point where teenage girls are having cosmetic surgery before their bodies are finished developing, so they can attain some standard they’ve seen in the media. The effect this process has had in our society has reached the point where it is nearly impossible to tell ‘beauty’ contest finalists apart. They are carbon copies of each other, with identical noses, mouths, eyes, bodies and rigid smiles.
Madison Avenue wants you to feel bad about your face and body, so you will spend lots of your hard-earned money on hiding or fixing your ‘flaws’. Do me a favor, turn off the teevee, put down the magazine and stop believing the lies. Don’t let the advertisers control you. Be generous, be forgiving, be happy. Develop your inner beauty, and let it shine. Love yourself, and others will love you too.
~
Thanks to The Bleat, where I first saw this.
This has long been something that has really bothered me about advertising. It has bothered me so much that I haven’t subscribed to any magazines for more than 10 years. I also do not watch TV, haven’t for over 2 years.
I got fed up with the machine. I grew to detest the noise and intrusion. I felt bombarded with messages for living my life in ways that are in complete opposition to who I am. Even though I no longer partake of the tube or magglebooks (that’s what I called them as a kid
there is still no escaping the pervasiveness of the Madison Ave machine.
Is it any wonder young girls, teens and women have such awful body images? Is it any wonder that men have such skewed expectations of women’s bodies? I think the scariest aspect of all this altering is that it has altered our perception of what is healthy.
This is very good. I went to the website and looked at the others. I found something similar on Youtube a while back entirely about Photoshop effects and how they can turn an “ugly” girl into a beauty.
I remember when I mentioned to the (much younger) women in my office that I was intending to stop dyeing my hair and let the natural grey grow through (best decision I ever made by the way). You would have thought I’d announced I’d eaten a baby for breakfast!