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Feminine Beauty Ideal In Advertising

1424 Words6 Pages

Advertisers have created a feminine beauty ideal by repeatedly showing models with exceptional features, such as a slim waist, a long neck and face, a flawless skin, big eyes, a light complexion, white teeth, and shiny hair. This ideal of beauty is not based on ordinary people; rather, it is a construction that is only depicted in magazines, advertisements, and on television. This constructed ideal consists of manipulated and unnatural images that serve for many people as the visualizations of femininity. The media does not only force this beauty ideal upon society by claiming that it is constitutive of women’s happiness, success, love, or health; it also provides us with all sorts of remedies to achieve the standards of the ideal. Society is bombarded with advertisements promoting diets, creams, cosmetics, plastic surgery, and styles of dress that will help people to become as attractive as possible. Realistically, even with the help of beauty products, only a very small percentage of women are able to achieve the promoted beauty ideal. That advertising “[pressures] women to achieve an ideal that may not be feasible for them” has not gone unnoticed (Fernandez 1). Critics argue that the beauty ideal has negative effects on the body satisfaction of women, to the extent that their confidence is undermined, and that they are tacitly encouraged to develop eating disorders or to resort to cosmetic surgery (Higgings 319; Bessenoff 239). This is not say that people are passive

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