Cosmetic Companies Design Ads Change Women 's Attitudes Towards Products Essay

Every time you flip a magazine, change channels, or go online, you are struck with images of models who are super skinny with flashy outfits and have excessive make-up on. Ads not only try to sell their products, but also promote how females should look like. These models are airbrushed and photo shopped which is false advertisement. The media progressively encourages a thinner body image as the ideal for women. We see advertisements every day. Some of these ads use manipulative strategies that influence our choices and spending habits. For example, “One in every three articles in leading teen girl magazines included a focus on appearance, and most advertisements used appeal to beauty to sell their products.”(Teen Health) To grab the viewers’ attention, especially females, they include

It is no secret that today’s society defines beauty as thin, long-legged women with statuesque bodies. Examples are found everywhere just by glancing at the closest magazine ads or by scrolling down the latest fashion article online. Normal, everyday women are being forgotten and tossed aside to make room for the “Top-Model”-like women currently crowding up Hollywood. Media depicts women as an unattainable image. They pressure ladies to buy the products they’re advertising; luring them with false advertisements promising that with it, they too could be perfect. While the media portrays women in a certain way for advertising and marketing benefits, it has caused numerous negatives effects to women’s self-esteems nationwide, it contradicts

The Beauty Myth’s central argument is the growing standards of physical beauty of women as they grow stronger. This standard has affected women in many ways, such as in the workplace, culture, and religion. The standard has taken over the work of social harassment. The beauty myth expands the belief an unbiased measurement of beauty exists and that women want to express it and men would want that women. The author, Naomi Wolf, states that the beauty myth is not about women themselves, it is about the power of men and their society. The myth supplies power to multibillion dollar cosmetics industries and it keeps women from rising too high in the workplace. Within this book, Wolf shows how the beauty myth functions and affects women in the workplace, media, sex, religion, culture, violence against women by men, and by women themselves in the configuration of cosmetic surgery and eating disorders.

For centuries, women have found it to be difficult to live up and be the standard “runaway model”. Women have the pressure to fit in to be considered beautiful since ads and media have distorted society in how they view and evaluate beauty. The false representation of models in the beauty commercials have made women want to replicate them even though they don’t know what’s behind the editing. Even though this is a huge matter, companies did not stand back but instead made more commercials that self-degrade women constantly, except one. The Dove Evolution Commercial- “Campaign for Real Beauty” focuses on the way they change women sending a strong message to women about beauty and what it really

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.

Cultivation Theory was developed by George Gerbner, and it speculated that the longer people watched television, “the more likely their conceptions of reality will reflect what they see on television” (Lett et al., 2004, p. 40). This way of thinking emerged when television gained popularity during its younger years, and people started investigating the long-term effects of watching television.

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

Images of female bodies are everywhere. Women, and their bodies, sell everything from food to cars. Women's magazines are full of articles urging women to fit a certain mold. While standing in a grocery store line you can see all different magazines promoting fashion, weight loss, and the latest diet. Although the magazines differ, they all seemingly convey the same idea: if you have the perfect body image you can have it all…the perfect marriage, loving children, great sex, and a rewarding career. The media, whether TV, print, or Internet advertising, seems to play a huge role in influencing women of all ages; from adolescence and teens, to women in their twenties and thirties, as well as

Beauty standards are an extremely critical issue facing young women today across the country. Beauty standards are changing the way we perceive ourselves. Beauty standards change the way we dress, our make-up, our hair, and our size. We think about what others will think based on how we look. In the morning, while getting dressed, we may say to ourselves, “What will they think?” or “Is this shirt too tight? Too loose?” We wonder if our hair is the right color, or if our teeth are white enough, and the largest standard of all, if we are skinny enough. In a short clip, “Beauty Standards Around the World,” created by Buzzfeed (2014) shows how each country defines beauty. Buzzfeed uses the rhetorical appeals of pathos and logos to effectively convince the viewers that society is manipulating women’s perception of beauty. A young girl sent out a photo with no make-up on and her hair pulled back to photo shop experts around the world. The results were upsetting.

In Growing Up With Television: Cultivation Process, Morgan, Shanahan and Signorielli assert that “long-term exposure to television tends to cultivate the image of a relatively mean and dangerous world (Morgan et al., 2009).” Rooted in the amount of time spent consuming content, the mean world syndrome is central to Gerber’s Cultivation Theory, or Effect. The theory states that they are viewing habits range from light to medium to heavy. Although subjective, the amount of time spent consuming content is a key component of cultivation effect. Morgan et al., noted that “the relative difference in viewing levels are more important than the specific amount of viewing (Morgan et al, 2009).”

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.

Cultivation theorists are best known for their study of television and viewers, and in particular for a focus on the topic of violence. However, some studies have also considered other mass media from this perspective, and have dealt with topics such as gender roles, age groups, ethnic groups and political attitudes. A study of American college students found that heavy soap opera viewers were more likely than light viewers to over-estimate the number of real-life married people who had affairs or who had been divorced and the number of women who had abortions (Dominick 1990, p. 512).

George Gerbner’s *cultivation theory* a macro-level system theory that examines mass communication by studying institutions, message systems, and cultivation analysis (1967; 1970; Gerbner & Gross, 1973; Gerbner et al., 1980; Potter, 2014). Theorized during the “Age of Television” (Shanahan & Morgan, 2004), the theory has been applied to newspapers and other media formats, assuming that media institutions “cultivate facts, norms and values of society” (Gerbner, 1970; Gerbner & Gross, 1976). Specifically, frequent television viewers are more likely to be influenced by portrayals of the world than viewers who watch less. The theory’s popularity grew after the rapid integration of televisions into American homes in the 1940s and 1950s, it was

Often times, women are pressured by the mainstream media to upkeep a stellar appearance. They are expected to measure up to high standards without question. Even before most girls reach puberty, commercials are bombarding them with small Barbie esque makeup kits filled with lip glosses and chalky eyeshadows. The impact it has on impressionable children, both girls and boys is something that will likely last a lifetime if unlearned. Cosmetic companies who are marketing to young ladies say they can simply improve their looks to gain acceptance from their peers if they use the products they are selling. The makeup industry is a multi million enterprise that makes a profit from women’s insecurities and amplified pressures from society as a common tactic many cosmetic campaigns use is to push women to embrace the ‘natural look’ by providing products that will make it appear as if the individual is not even wearing makeup. Companies will spout out that with these products, the end result will be ‘you, but better.’ It is somewhat of an underlying and slightly manipulating slogan, as if to say how a woman appears could be improved because it is lacking in the moment. This distorts how we all believe how a woman is suppose to look.

Many young women in today’s society struggle with confidence and their body image. This is a huge problem in society and many people have spoken out against the influence of media on women’s body image. However, it continues to be a major problem and more can always be done to raise awareness about societies unrealistic expectations for women’s beauty. Dove’s Choose Beautiful campaign was started to promote the self-esteem of women and encourage them to see their beauty, however there are some criticisms, including the company using this campaign to increase their sales. Dove is selling a product with the expectation that confident, beautiful women will purchase it, however people still have the ability to resist the ad industry.