Beauty, an analysis on beauty marketing

To live in our consumer society is to be constantly bombarded with marketing campaigns and advertisements. Corporations hold immense power over us as buyers, telling us that we will never be as good as x, y, or z if we do not buy these shoes, these pants, this car. These messages become so entrenched within our hearts and minds that we believe them to be true. We compare ourselves to celebrities and models when we only ever see them on our side of the screen. And we forget the process it takes for a photo to end up on our feed or in a magazine. We forget about airbrushing and Photoshop and take the images as reality, and we wonder why we do not look the same. However, younger generations are keenly aware of the falsehoods which many ads claim as truth, and marketing has caught on as well. As consumers, we see less obvious editing, and campaigns centered around celebrating natural beauty and diverse bodies.

Some of these campaigns are truly magical. One of these magical campaigns is the Dove Real Beauty campaign. In this video, “You’re more beautiful than you think,” a forensic artist sketches people given a self description and a description from a stranger whom they briefly met. A majority of people over exaggerated their own features or perceived flaws, while the others were drawn to their natural beauty and features. I find this ad to be truly magical because it is so realistic. It very much captures what it feels like to be a consumer in a society where the standard of beauty is so impossible, where we are hyper aware of our own flaws and imperfections.

*** the advertisement in question can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpaOjMXyJGk