Joanne Scaife – 4th November 2011
Beauty & Advertising
Last week, I had the unforgettable experience of modelling on a photo shoot. The results really made me think about constructed beauty in advertising, and why we want it.
I spent a good portion of the morning being pampered and preened by an amazing stylist, as she busied herself pulling on my hair and plastering my face with all manner of products, she also began to give me a myriad of tips on how to make the best of my features. A touch of bronzer on the forehead, nose and chin, highlighter on the top of the cheekbone, using green mascara as a base to bring out the colour in my eyes etc… You get the drift. I never knew there were so many little tricks. All this made me feel ever so fabulous by the time she was finished, I was ready for my close up Mr DeMille.
The shoot began and I was instructed to put myself into various unbelievably uncomfortable positions. All I could hear through the constant firing of the flash was the photographer shouting. ‘Push your arse out, now drop the shoulders, suck in your stomach and arch your back, put your arms up there and stick your tits out, no, drop the shoulders again, point your toes, tilt your hips this way, right, now turn your head 180 degrees and smile!’
He had to be kidding me, I felt like a contortionist in knots and he expected me to bloody smile. Through gritted teeth, I just about managed to grimace through the pain. If you thought modelling was easy, think again.
After two long hours and my muscles practically giving way, trembling with agony, I anxiously waited for the ‘Tog’ to upload the shots to the Mac. After all the effort we put in them, I must look amazing. With all the excitement of a dog at a cat show, I sat beside him, waiting to see the results of this pain and hard work. As he flicked quickly through each shot my excitement soon turned to disappointment, there were a few with the lighting just a bit off, a few that were not framed quite right, and lots of shots of me looking like I was just about to sneeze.
Overall, they were alright I suppose, just nothing like I expected. Not one of them stood out like the fabulous model shots I was used to seeing on billboards and magazines. Ok, so I’m not exactly Kate Moss, but after everything I had been through that day, I expected at least a few shots to have some sort of wow factor. However, in full HD, I could see every little flaw I had, the dark bin liners under my eyes, red patches around my nose, sun spots, veins, blemishes, the moustache I didn’t realise was there, and the vast, ever increasing array of wrinkles that no amount of make-up would cover.
Occasionally, the ‘Tog’ would mutter ‘ooohh, that one’s good’. I would look at the screen and then at him, my face obviously unimpressed by what I saw. He answered my expression with ‘Don’t worry, these are really good, I will edit them all post production.’
So, after all that effort, the three inches of make-up on my face, the painstakingly tricky lighting effects that took an hour to set up, and the back braking positions they forced me into, I still look, well, just normal. Does it really take the wonder of Photoshop to turn me into a model? Well yes, obviously.
Was I disappointed because of my own unrealistic expectations of what a professional photographer and make-up artist can do with a normal face like mine, or was it due to the fact that our culture thrives in a world of unrealistic images and we all expect perfection every time?
Ok, Maybe it’s a little from column A and a little from column B, but the point remains the same. We are bombarded everyday with images of stick thin, beautiful models, painstakingly airbrushed so that the photo no longer resembles an actual representation of a real woman. Advertisements cloud our judgement, infect society with idealistic images, and make us aspire to the goddesses of perfection that do not actually exist. We spend copious amounts of money on beauty products, trying to be like the models we see and then feel guilty and disappointed when we don’t come up to our own unrealistic expectations.
If you haven’t seen this yet, I highly recommend watching Killing Us Softly 4 presented by Jean Kilbourne. Over the past forty years, she has researched and documented on how women are being distorted and devalued in advertising. Covering some great insights on how we should think critically about advertising and sexism.
Ok, so now I’m in a bit of a dilemma. As a woman in modern culture, I know I want to look more beautiful than I ever could be and I know that advertising is one culprit in perpetuating these ideals. As I found out at my photo shoot all the hard work, the make-up tricks, the lighting, and the positioning, will never make me look like I want to, only the computer can create the perfect image, but yet, I will still aspire to this.
I don’t feel comfortable without putting my make-up on in a morning and without it my self-confidence wouldn’t be as high. We think differently towards people who are attractive than those who are unattractive. I know that images of ugly people will never sell products, unless they were openly mocking them. That’s the nature of our culture. We wouldn’t use unattractive people as we would never aspire to be like them, would we?
So the question I ask myself is this, does advertising create the unrealistic expectations of generations of people or simply mirror the values we already have engrained in our society?
Being beautiful was considered a virtue long before we had mass-market media, racism has been a problem for centuries due to our history, and we had violence and inequality towards women long before we objectified them in advertising. I do not disagree with anything that Jean says in her film but yet I don’t vilify advertising either. I agree that some ads may cross a line and some stereotypes should not be propagated but it will continue to be that way, media is just a reflection of us and the culture we create.
We all want to be more than we could ever achieve and we strive for more than we have, we are never satisfied, and this is what advertising utilises because it’s a fundamental drive of the human condition. It’s who we are and it’s what we want. Advertising only amplifies the truth in society, all it’s aspirations and it’s flaws.
It will only change when we do.
