Short Story and Title Mascara Essay

The advancement in the cosmetic industry has increased since the introduction of makeup towards young teenager has become viral. To these students, makeup is an experiment on finding this true passion and beauty. The article, “Makeup is a form of Art”, states that makeup is an art form when seen in the perspective of human beings as a canvas and that, “Each day, the canvas is blank yet again and a new makeup look can be created.”In addition, every shade of eye shadow, every lip shade, and the different type of brushes all incorporate the transformation of a person's personality or ideas to deliver the message of who they are. Young girls and guys from the ages twelve to around 18 begin their introduction of makeup out of curiosity and issues with insecurities, but part of it was accumulated with the idea of building it into a talent. In one of my interviews, I selected Thalia Zuniga to represent this argument as she is a woman who created her own YouTube channel and a separate Instagram account that gives her the ability to share her artistic concepts to other people. She states, “Makeup is an art. I don’t put pink on my eyelid because I'm insecure. I wear makeup because it is an art, it’s a way to transform yourself into a form of art itself… it takes skill to get to the beautiful, creaseless beauty that makeup is,”

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.

Under society’s customs for decades, young women have found themselves immersed in the pressure and anticipation to have exemplary bodies. Nearly every young woman prefers to be slim, have a perfectly shaped body, that is beautified by applying pounds of makeup to their face but does not appear ridiculously overdone. Who’s responsible for these measures imposed on young women? When a young girl picks up the model on the cover of Vogue being called flawless, naturally it’s easy for her to then aspire to be a real-life imitation of the that model. These companies produce magazine covers shown with girls’ images daily. As if keeping the perfect body wasn’t hard enough, our culture also forces girls into the forever expanding world of composition, however, body image is a surging subject for young girls. Advertisements and pictures of lean female models are all over. Young women are measured and perplexed by their physical appearances with attire intended to raise their physical structures; social media, magazines, the society, marketing campaigns, advertisements, and the fashion gurus add to a strand of excellence.

There is a cliché quote that people say, “Beauty is in the eye of beholder.” But in the essay “The Ugly Truth About Beauty” (1998) Dave Barry argues about how women who spend countless hours on their so called “beauty” whereas men seem not to care. Barry uses juxtaposition and exaggeration to poke fun at men and women behavior and shed light on the harm that the beauty industry is doing. When Barry argues his point of his essay he addresses both genders, but more specifically teenage to middle age men and women, but he writes about it in a humorous and light-hearted manner.

The argument of The Beauty Myth is that as women have received more eminence, the standard of their personal appearance has also grown. Wolf’s position on the issue is that this type of social control is potentially just as restrictive as the traditional roles of women. The Beauty Myth discusses how society’s viewpoint of beauty is detrimental to women because it causes many emotional and psychological problems to women who strive to become “perfect”. This book is important due to the fact it raises awareness to the issues that many young women are currently facing.

Like today in the 21st century, being perfect is the most talked about concern in majority of our women today. Being beautiful classifies being prefect. Being perfect classifies

Societies rule is that when you turn 16, you are forced to have cosmetic surgery resulting in you becoming so called ‘Pretty’. The book forces you to confront matters such as the perception of beauty, the notion of State versus individual choice and the matter of control. Tally Youngblood, the book's main character, is taken through a journey of self discovery and exploration of these matters. Initially Tally believed turning ‘Pretty’ would be a dream come true and is anxiously awaiting her sixteenth birthday where she believes her life will be transformed. She has been led to believe that her beauty will open her life to new and exciting experiences such as black tie dinners and fun parties.

As a middle school student, I was oblivious to the unrealistic portrayals in the media, but I was not able to escape its harmful grasp. It seemed every girl at the school suffered with body image issues because their perception of beauty is what they had been taught by society. Anorexia and bulimia were far too common, while self-esteem and confidence were very hard to find. Not only were the girls trying to become “beautiful,” they were also trying to act older than they were. Starting at the extreme, drugs, alcohol, and sex seemed normal; far less extreme were the excessive amounts of makeup, skimpy outfits, and usage of the proper slang. These girls were merely doing what the media had taught them; they were being, or trying to be,

Speaking for most girls, we often feel the need to be perfect. I am sick of these pressures and stereotypes that being a girl has put on me. I have been told my whole life what I should look like,

This chapter opened my eyes even further and made me realize that the reality is that it is hard to disassociate from “cultural obsession with female beauty as an artifice”(p.108), and that I am not alone and it is normal to struggle. At a certain point of my life, I did not enjoy being a woman. For me, being a woman equated to imposed restrictions, makeup, and the subject of men’s whims and jeers. I have come out of this stage, however I still hesitate to wear frilly clothes and makeup.

There has been a growing trend of hypersexualization of women over the span of all forms of media. The women within these images are made to look perfectly flawless. They are extremely thin without a trace of fat or cellulite to be found. The people who consume this media are exposed to the idea that the women they are observing are models for true physical beauty. These standards are accompanied by an alternate message from the media that pushes the idea that women’s value comes from their beauty. While some women may understand that the messages about the ideal woman are unrealistic and false, it is found that adolescent girls are vulnerable to the media’s strategies due to their lack of media literacy as well as the search for their own identity during this developmental stage in their lives. The exposure to these standards of beauty can have several negative effects on the girls such as lower self-esteem, higher body dissatisfaction, depression, and eating disorders. SPARK and 4 Every Girl are two of a growing number of campaigns that are working to fight against the sexualized images of women in the media and the negative effects it can have on the viewers.

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)

In society nowadays, we are surrounded and affected by the social media. Often times we turn to social media to under the world around us, and also to make sense of our identity. For instance, people are influence and come to understand their identity with the interaction they make with media. Therefore, our perception of our existence is socially constructed through the influence of media. As stated by Duke and Kreshel, “we create and perpetuate and understanding what it means to be a woman [or men] in our society.” (Duke & Kreshel, 1998). But with this overwhelming clutter of information from social media it can impact on how we view our identity. Female adolescent’s self-identity is socially constructed through the magazine which can negatively impact their perception of their own femininity. Magazine creates female ideology, giving girls insecurity about their look and weight, and finally the feminine identity is socially structured from male point of view. In this paper I will analyse the magazine Seventeen how it socially constructs negative perception of female identity. Seventeen magazine is chosen for analysis because it is one of the top selling magazines and it is highly popular amongst the adolescent girls in the United States. I restrict my analysis only on teenage girls only because they are the largest consumer of magazines compare to male. Also, adolescent is the stage in life where they try to figure out their sexuality, gender identity and where would they fit into society (Durham, 1998).

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.

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.