The Business of Beauty is Ugly
Working in at a cosmetic counter this summer has taught me some of the beauty behind the cosmetic industry, but also the ugly. The images we see on magazines, movie posters, and advertisements for the most unexpected brands are not real, not at all. They are manufactured with photoshop, digital editing, and a whole crew of professional photographers to present a flawless product. But who does this serve? Who benefits from the unrealistic expectations?
The beauty industry does. They are here to help you, more like here to help you spend your money. With magazine headlines “Look a decade younger”, “Your weight, minus eight”, this is what the average magazine stand looks like. Women spend more money on beauty than education. This is not to mention fashion. Together, beauty and fashion are a 1.3 trillion-dollar industry who have made a business on setting unrealistic standards, and then profiting. They profit off exploiting the insecurities that they have helped create. Growing up, young girls easily see they don’t “fit the mold” when flipping through magazines, the lack of fuzzy curly hair or even freckles.
When women don’t feel beautiful, it can lead to major social issues. Doug Research shows that only 4% of women find themselves beautiful. Why is that? Eight out of ten women opt out of important societal events when they don’t feel beautiful. Not feeling beautiful, means not feeling powerful. Eight out of ten young girls self-select themselves out of sports, activities, or evening raising their hand in class because they don’t want to draw attention to themselves.
The beauty gap refers to the gap of unrealistic standards set by unrealistic one-dimensional photographs being presented to us and where our true beauty resides. A recent example was on the news about 70-year-old woman posing on the front of the magazine. When the photos came back to the editor, she shook her head “No, these won’t do. Her legs look too… old.” Well, duh, she’s in her seventies. The editor called for a leg model to be photoshopped in place of the true model’s legs. The magazine cover shows the seventy-year-old woman, with the legs of twenty-something year old. The extra work done on the photo ended up getting exposed. However, this makes you wonder how much the beauty industry gets away with.
Looking at photos used on the cover of magazines and advertisements makes us define beauty as just that. The power of media should be used to emancipate and empower women worldwide and change the image currently sold as “perfection” around the globe. Obviously, no one is perfect. A solution that would uncover these fake images would be to limit photoshopping. I am not saying that we should do away with facetune, only the complete alterations done on photos. Even listing what the changes were in the back of the magazine might help limit changes. This summer, I work at the Clinique cosmetic counter in a department store. Before I started working there, I was not a makeup “guru” and I also lacked a skincare regimen. Customers, or as I call them my clients, are brainwashed into thinking a $40 cream will rid them of a decade of wrinkles. That sounds crazy, but why do these women believe it? But in reality, sunscreen and washing your face with drugstore products will do just the same.