Beauty And Body Image Essay

Throughout their lives, women of all ages are constantly being bombarded with advertisements convincing them they must meet an ideal of the perfect body image. This is all thanks to companies that share a common goal to influence the mainstream population into believing they need to purchase certain products in order to compare to the impossible standards set by the beauty industry. In Dave Barry’s “Beauty and the Beast” he displays that it is planted in young girls minds that they need to look, dress, feel, and even act a certain way. However, men aren’t as affected by these capitalistic marketing schemes. In short, the media has affected the way women think of themselves.

Beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder. At least, that’s what is taught to believe at an early age. Elline Lipkin, however, holds fast to the understanding that as true as that saying may be, there are outside forces that are intent on readjusting our vision to “true beauty”: the kind that can be bought off the shelves. In her article, “Girls’ Bodies, Girls’ Selves: Body Image, Identity, and Sexuality”, Lipkin employs several different external resources to help demonstrate her belief that young girls’ (“Before they even abandon their teddy bears…“ (Para 2)) definition of their own appearance is polluted and distorted by the vastly massive world that is the American media. Besides pulling from other articles and fact sheets, she also effectively utilizes a clearly logical train of thought, an operative tone, and countless examples of emotional appeal.

Moreover, as Richins (1991) reports, women always make social comparisons between the advertising models and themselves. As a result, advertising images create negative affect and increases women’s dissatisfaction with their own appearance. Since those images are edited through the consistent usage of digital technology, these idealized images do not portray women in a healthy manner. Indeed, these enhanced images would give these young girls the impression that they need to be ‘perfect’, just like these ‘fake’ images. According to Reist in ABC’s Gruen Session (2010), ‘young women get the message that they need to be thin, hot and sexy just to be acceptable’ in this society. Therefore, by generating the wrong perception of real beauty, the responsibility is pushed to the marketers, as they portray women with this stereotypical body type as acceptable. In addition, as the brand, Dove’s tagline in its advertisement - What happened to the ‘real beauty’? (Reist, 2010), marketers need not market their products in manners portraying women as airheads. Consequently, marketers gave most consumers viewing the advertisement, the wrong impression that

Kurt was having a superb day, he walked into the footlocker store and seen the Jordan’s he saw a few weeks ago still in the store, and now were on sale for $90.00. Instantly he reached them to try them on. Kurt squeezed his foot into the shoes, he starts to walk in the shoes, and all of a sudden the shoe is uncomfortable to walk in. Thoughts started running on the top of his head like. Did me growing make my feet grow as well? Did gaining weight cause my feet to have some growth to them? Is it time to start buying bigger sizes?

Why is the model industry, creating this idea that all females have to look like this ‘doll’ to be beautiful? Society has moulded the ‘ideal’ body image to an unattainable goal fashioned by the criteria established through advertising. Advertisements are enforcing the standards of beauty to encourage our youth to believe and aspire to become this contemporary based view of what beautiful is.

In this written piece I will discover the topics of how the beauty media promotion has an impact and result on the appearance of women today and how this can effect someone’s confidence and self-esteem and showing what beautiful is now classed as in today’s beauty world. How this can result in how someone perceives themselves to be and how the media has a big influence on our young adults today how it has influenced people to change their face & body by range of different cosmetic surgery, The effects it can have on the human mind & body According to The Effects of the Media on Body Image: A Meta-Analysis Amanda J. Holmstrom Pages 196-217 | Published online: 07 Jun 2010.

Body image remains to be a very controversial topic in today’s society, because of how easy it is to become a hate crime over a small comment on how small or big someone’s body is. Today, it is unavoidable to see the look that it seems society wants us to look. Professor Susan Bordo writes the article, “Never Just Pictures”, describing her investigation between the media and its effects on how people view their bodies. She uses ethos, logos, and pathos to bring in the attention of the people, in order to get her message across to be aware of media and how they portray the ideal body image. Bordo notes the patterns of the different types of models that magazines and commercial ads use, to say that even though they have changed the face of beauty, they never really changed the body of it. And she analyzes the affects that these ads have on how people view their bodies, and alter what the ‘ideal’ body image is. Bordo uses other sources to prove her argument mainly allowing readers to have more reasons to side with her argument. Having reviewed this article, I think that we should publish this article in the Shorthorns, because it will attract the attention of most people, since right now young people still struggle with differentiating between what is a real body and what is a body that has been altered for the likes of what the media likes.

Beauty is hard to define and is said to be in the eye of the beholder, but desire for women to be beautiful and stay beautiful is a goal in our culture today. Though our society and loved ones emphasize that beauty lies within one’s character, our society also contradicts this idea because they tend to focus on physical appearance more. Beauty perception has evolved from embracing natural qualities in earlier decades to promoting superficiality in today’s society due to cultural changes such as the discovery of new beauty products and procedures and depictions made through mass and social media. The evolution of beauty from previous decades is drastic. Tracing back to the 1900’s up until the 1940’s, ideal beauty involved natural qualities

In her article “The Body Beautiful”, Rosalind Coward (1998) argues that society creates a negative obsessions of the “perfect” female body and it affects women negatively in their daily lives. She explains that women have to think of their bodies in separate parts and believe that each part has a different life of their own. Coward goes on to explain the way society expects women to be seen as by providing readers with example advertisements and how it pushes women toward having the body that is viewed acceptable. She concludes by stating that although society creates a negative obsession of the “perfect” body, it helps women from falling into despair because they keep a vague relation to the ideal image. By analyzing an advertisement for Elizabeth Arden’s anti aging serum, we see Rosalind Coward argues that advertisements for facial product often expect women to be flawless and perfect in their body figures.

Throughout history women specifically have felt the need to change their physical appearance in order to be accepted by societies beauty ideal. Social media has influenced women to believe that the word “beauty” defines the outward appearance according to the internets definition — “beauty is a combination of qualities, such as shape, color, or form, that pleases the aesthetic senses, especially the sight.” The definition itself allows anyone to mistakenly interpret the word “beauty” to determine whether or not the physical appearance is attractive enough to be considered beautiful. There are so many emphasis placed on a person’s physical appearance that makes one “beautiful" and “desirable" such the numbers on a scale or measurement, youth, color of skin, etc., but for those who do not meet the media’s ideal expectations are judged or ridiculed. Social media perceives a strong influence on women and what people define beauty to be, but realistically, humans are built to be compelled by enhanced images that are presented in advertisement that create an illusion and fantasy that people admire. The ideal physical appearance that is propagated tends to connect with numerous organizations whose profits promote cosmetics to illuminate facial structures, photoshopped images of famous figures seen in magazines or ads, and cosmetic procedures including liposuction, breast enlargement, and plastic surgery to attain the perfect body ideal. With the continuation of women believing in

Writing for the Huffington Post, Temimah Zucker presents her opinion on society’s expectation for women in America through different forms of communication and advertisement. Zucker’s article is based off of what you as a woman, think of yourself, versus what society thinks of you. Zucker believes that society’s opinions and beliefs will constantly change through the generations, but your thoughts about your own beauty will not become gray to you; “Beauty is molded by society -- by the advertising, fashion, and cosmetic industries. We live in a society of billboards and ads, Photoshop, and Botox. We are trained to believe that size two is perfect, while most healthy women in America fit into a size 12.” (1)

Beauty standards are portrayed everywhere: on magazines, social media, ads, commercials, and even flaunted among peers. While the ideals are supposed to promote health awareness, fitness motivation, and self love, it unfortunately results in many unfavorable consequences. Women are constantly “penalized for not being beautiful and at the same time are stigmatized, even pathologized, for not feeling beautiful, for having low self-esteem, for engaging in behaviors like dieting and excessive exercising, or for having eating disorders” (Johnston and Taylor 954). Beauty standards are unrealistic and unhealthy to pursue, and misinforms the public on what true beauty is. While not all beauty image ideals promote negative feelings and dissatisfaction, many believe that the negative effects far outweighs any positive effects.

Advertising uses a lot of different techniques to show the public the perfect female image. Body doubles and computer retouching are two examples of how advertisers are able to “doctor” images. The majority of women we see in magazines, music videos. and movies do not appear in reality, as we perceive them in the media. We may actually believe we are looking at one woman’s body when we are actually looking at sections of three or four women’s bodies, which, when spliced together, shows us the best parts of each women’s body as the final product. Women cannot attain these impossible standards of attractiveness. Young girls learn very quickly that they must spend much time, energy, and money on achieving these standards.

It 's not a mystery that society 's ideals of beauty have a drastic and frightening effect on women. Popular culture frequently tells society, what is supposed to recognize and accept as beauty, and even though beauty is a concept that differs on all cultures and modifies over time, society continues to set great importance on what beautiful means and the significance of achieving it; consequently, most women aspire to achieve beauty, occasionally without measuring the consequences on their emotional or physical being. Unrealistic beauty standards are causing tremendous damage to society, a growing crisis where popular culture conveys the message that external beauty is the most significant characteristic women can have. The approval of prototypes where women are presented as a beautiful object or the winner of a beauty contest by evaluating mostly their physical attractiveness creates a faulty society, causing numerous negative effects; however, some of the most apparent consequences young and adult women encounter by beauty standards, can manifest as body dissatisfaction, eating disorders that put women’s life in danger, professional disadvantage, and economic difficulty.

As we all know there used to be a saying that quoted “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” That particular statement is true because even though one may feel as if they see nothing beautiful in them others might feel as if they are quite charming. Individuals feel as if outer beauty is the most important because the outer beauty is more egomaniacal and arrogant. Rather we like it or not the outer beauty is what defines people, and people may believe that one’s body figure, complexion, or sophistication is what makes them alluring. They use material things to help maintain these images; which is why we see so many beauty ads. Commercials can be prejudice towards other thing or products which makes most of these commercials/ads