Beauty And Advertising

Beauty And Advertising

Women and the Media
While flipping through the pages of the June 2011 issue of Vogue I came across an advertisement for Gucci which depicted a rather ridiculous and offending scene. It featured a stunning dark haired, tan, and slender woman wearing the latest from Gucci, a low cut taupe blouse and what appeared to be little else. She is shown in a bowing position at the feet of a very muscular and shirtless man, he is also faceless due to the fact his face is not shown in the ad, he is only shown up to his chest. The background shows a desert-like surrounding with no one else around. The man’s stance is very intimidating almost toward violent while in contrast the woman appears vulnerable at his feet; she is tugging at the bottom of her blouse to try and cover herself up, well as much as she can in that revealing shirt. This is all that is in the advertisement; there are no words in the ad at all just the picture. And as the saying goes “a picture is worth a thousand words”.
Beauty advertisements are a main cause of women’s body insecurities for a variety of different reasons. Women are pressured much more than men by the media and their representation of what beauty is, this brings those insecurities closer to the surface and constantly causes women to use their energy in thinking about how they should like, what they should look like, in fact beauty advertisements dictates what beauty is supposed to look like on images and videos by perfectly photoshopping and editing them to produce what we now perceive as beauty. Here I’ll go on to explain how beauty advertisements are fuelling women’s body insecurities. In American advertising it has almost always been about selling an image to the public not a product. They are giving the public what they want, conformation and a solution to their insecurities. This observation is very apparent in the Gucci ad I found, symbolizing both a male ideal and a female ideal. The woman in the ad is very beautiful, almost in a...