Last night I had dinner with a couple of friends. Christine, one of them, had just returned from New York and brought me back a book called “Body Outlaws – Rewriting the Rules of Beauty and Body Image,” a collection of frank, powerful, and sometimes humorous essays about self-image.
I started reading passages from it on the subway on my way home. Carolyn Mackler’s “Memoirs of a (sorta) Ex-Shaver” – about women’s travails with body hair – made a strong impression on me, because the ultimate message is very close to the thesis of The Illusionists.
Here’s my favorite passage:
Why had body hair become such a nemesis for women? It poses no health risks. It is not hygienic to remove; it is not cleansing to shave. Rather, the complications arise during the eradication: cuts, infections, rashes, ingrown hairs, dry skin, burning. Is this hairless ideal yet another variation on the tune of ‘let’s take the best (boobs, curves in some places, hair in very few places) and leave the rest (hips, curves in other places, hair in lots of other places)’? Or is it: ‘Let’s make women look like 8-year-olds so we can treat them as such’? Or is it: ‘If women can fill up their extra hours shaving and obsessing about their bodies, then they won’t have spare time to plot world takeover’? Or maybe it’s: ‘Women are so grossly overpaid and just don’t spend enough on pads, tampons, pantyliners, Ibuprofen, shampoos, conditioners, deodorants, that we should coax them to buy razors, waxes, creams and bleaches.’ A-ha, it’s probably: ‘How about setting another unattainable ideal for women so they will always fall short of the mark.’ I mean, what are women if they’re not feeling insecure about something or another?
From the Washington Post’s “On Being” video series: an interview of make-up artist Bailey Orenia-Sessoms – who speaks eloquently about race, beauty, and self-esteem.
A terrific quote:
When you have that lack of self-love, you’re more susceptible to accepting society’s “beauty standards” and then you find yourself not liking who you are year to year because every year (fashion) changes.
Last month, during a brief stay in Italy to visit my family, I noticed a disturbing new trend in advertising: creams designed to “lift” breasts and buttocks.
The last time I had seen a print ad for a similar product, I was in my early teens: in the back pages of all the popular teen magazines, I would see ads for X-ray glasses (destined for boys, to see through the clothes of women) and various “miracle” creams designed to accelerate puberty and turn a flat chested girl into a Pamela Anderson-like bombshell. My friends and I would dismiss this as utter rubbish (with the exception of a hopeful pimply faced boy in my class who once purchased X-ray glasses and brought them to school. Sadly, they didn’t work).
Fast-forward to today. Imagine my shock, when, while sitting in my dentist’s waiting room, I see that ads for creams to “increase breast size” are peppering the pages of virtually all the women’s magazines I pick up. Even more surprising? These creams belong to major (read: well respected) cosmetics companies.
Some examples (note: one of the photos below is a bit graphic, showing a nipple, so NSFW for those of you in the United States. Us Europeans are used to a lot worse)
The Title: “Dalla Ricerca COLLISTAR” (“from Collistar’s Research Team” – thus legit, no?)
“La rivoluzionaria novità che rassoda e solleva il seno” = “The revolutionary new product that firms and lifts breasts”
“più alto 2,7 cm” = “1,1 inch higher”
“più voluminoso +1cm” = “1/2 inch more volume”
“più sodo per il 90% delle donne testate” = “firmer breasts for 90% of women tested”
And now, let’s look at the pretty little asterisks that accompany each claim. Mind you, you may need eyeglasses to read those teeny tiny scribbles at the bottom of the page:
“Test clinico-strumentali” = gibberish? Well, let’s say clinical tests conducted on 20 women at an important Italian university. “An important Italian university”? WTF? Also: “maximum values reported after 60 days”. Whatever that means.
Let’s look at another ad, this one from Pupa, a cosmetics company that usually targets teenage girls and women in their 20s-early 30s:
This ad uses a similar language – as well as outrageous claims:
* Maximum value found in 3 subjects out of 35. Median value: 1 cm.
*** Tests are self-evaluations of 35 women during 8 weeks.
The self-evaluation part is what interests me. Because, whenever you see claims about anti-wrinkle creams, or anti-cellulite creams, or any other potion on the market (creams to increase breasts, buttocks, make your hair fuller, etc.) the percentages the ads refer to are not objective scientific findings. No. All beauty companies – big and small – use the results of self-evaluations in their marketing campaigns.
I once saw a documentary on TV that featured a French lab where they test 90% of cosmetics on the market. Women who participate in the study are given loads of free samples and usually return to the lab after 2 months to fill out a questionnaire about their satisfaction with a given product. A smiling lab attendant asks questions about one’s satisfaction (with yes/no answer) and then the results are compiled. In the documentary in question, a turtle-faced woman in her 60s say that the anti-wrinkle cream she had used had shown positive results. I couldn’t believe it. It’s ALL SUBJECTIVE: no scientific tests are carried out to confirm the claims. After all, if creams could actually reduce wrinkles, lift breasts, eliminate cellulite, why would women resort to expensive and intrusive procedures like Botox, breast implants and liposuction?
What these cosmetics companies are actually selling is HOPE.
After all, Charles Revson, founder of Revlon once said: “In the factory we make cosmetics; in the drugstore we sell hope.”
For an insightful article about the misleading marketing practices of cosmetics companies, click here.
It’s the same with the breast creams above. A few more examples:
What to do about this? Send your complaints to consumers’ associations.
Yesterday, the blog Jezebel discussed a recent segment that ran on ABC’s Good Morning America:
Good Morning America recreated the 1940s experiment in which 63% of African-American children given identical white and black dolls said they’d rather play with the white doll and 44% identified more with the white doll.
The original Jezebel post and the GMA video can be found here.
That made me remember a video that I had watched over a year ago, directed by a young African American girl, who ran the very same experiment and also filmed lots of interviews of fellow African American girls, discussing self image, body image, and discrimination. It was far, far more powerful and emotional than the GMA video. I highly recommmend watching it:
Girls today are salon vets before they enter elementary school. Forget having mom trim your bangs, fourth graders are in the market for lush $50 haircuts; by the time they hit high school, $150 highlights are standard. Five-year-olds have spa days and pedicure parties. And instead of shaving their legs the old-fashioned way—with a 99-cent drugstore razor—teens get laser hair removal, the most common cosmetic procedure of that age group. If these trends continue, by the time your tween hits the Botox years, she’ll have spent thousands on the beauty treatments once reserved for the “Beverly Hills, 90210″ set, not junior highs in Madison, Wis.
Reared on reality TV and celebrity makeovers, girls as young as Marleigh are using beauty products earlier, spending more and still feeling worse about themselves. Four years ago, a survey by the NPD Group showed that, on average, women began using beauty products at 17. Today, the average is 13—and that’s got to be an overstatement. According to market-research firm Experian, 43 percent of 6- to 9-year-olds are already using lipstick or lip gloss; 38 percent use hairstyling products; and 12 percent use other cosmetics. And the level of interest is making the girls of “Toddlers & Tiaras” look ordinary. “My daughter is 8, and she’s like, so into this stuff it’s unbelievable,” says Anna Solomon, a Brooklyn social worker. “From the clothes to the hair to the nails, school is like No. 10 on the list of priorities.“
(Emphasis mine.)
The article continues,
Why are this generation’s standards different? To start, this is a group that’s grown up on pop culture that screams, again and again, that everything, everything, is a candidate for upgrading. These girls are maturing in an age when older women are taking ever more extreme measures, from Botox to liposuction, to stay sexually competitive. They’ve watched bodies transformed on “Extreme Makeover”; faces taken apart and pieced back together on “I Want a Famous Face.” They compare themselves to the overly airbrushed models in celebrity and women’s magazines, and learn about makeup from the girls of “Toddlers & Tiaras,” or the show’s WEtv competitor, “Little Miss Perfect.”
Read the full article here – and check out the interactive chart about women’s beauty spending, from childhood into their 60s. Disturbing stuff.
(According to Corriere della Sera, the website complex.com mistakenly published an unretouched photo of Kim Kardashian on its site. And consequently corrected the error.)
So what: I have a little cellulite. What curvy girl doesn’t!?
How many people do you think are photoshopped? It happens all the time!
At the same time as this Complex shoot, I was gearing up for my fitness DVD and you should see my thighs now!!! Haha!
This all motivates me to stay in the gym because my goal this year has been to get in better shape and tone up! Hard work pays off!
I’m proud of my body and my curves and this picture coming out is probably helpful for everyone to see that just because I am on the cover of a magazine doesn’t mean I’m perfect.
You can check out more behind-the-scenes pics from the shoot right here. And they’re not retouched!
What do you do when the home economy is in a slump and sales are stagnating? But of course, expand to foreign markets! New emerging markets = untapped resources.
And so, here we are: Middle Eastern and Chinese women are the next targets of the beauty myth, as beauty companies introduce them to new products, making them understand the capital importance of fighting against – gasp! – evil wrinkles and having glossy hair.
Most vicious thing about it all: the deception – and the fact a Dubai dermatologist would lie through his teeth. Wonder how much he was paid by Pond’s.
Most vicious thing about it all: if the images below are taken from the actual ads, the biggest problem is that not a single model is Chinese. They all look pretty Caucasian to me. And all the chatter about self-empowering women. You are trying to sell shampoo!
