Soc344 Female Aesthetics

Feminine beauty and youth are no longer mere attributes. They have become one of the most desired and demanded products today. Thanks to technological advances such as laser-liposuction, velashape (for cellulite reduction), laser hair-removal and bio-stimulation, fractional wrinkle treatment, Botox, collagen injections, chemical peels, etc., beauty and youth are viewed as commodities that can and should be purchased. Edmontonian cosmetic clinics use fliers and advertisements to create desire for the “perfect” façade. By using glamorous characters that are presented as more confident, happy, powerful, and successful because of their beauty, these advertising images implicitly create a yearning in female consumers that must be filled.
In other words, and in Saussurian terms, the link between the “signifier” (beautiful woman) and the “signified” (happiness, confidence, belonging) is made to seem natural though advertising when in reality it is arbitrary. So, “naturally” beauty must be attained in order to achieve happiness, confidence and a sense of belonging that a young woman desires in her life. Increasingly younger and younger women are targeted by advertising and popular culture messages, making them self-conscious of their flaws and imperfections, creating the need and desire for such cosmetic procedures at an early age.

For example, one of the members of our group went to Dr. Barry Lycka’s clinic simply for a consultation at the age of 18, and has been receiving unwanted fliers from that clinic ever since. The advertisements are for cellulite reduction procedures, collagen injections and other procedures that were once viewed as procedures for the middle-aged.
This sort of incessant bombardment creates in the heads of young girls the promise of an “idealized future self”, an unattainable perfection to which they will always strive. The situation is even worse than we had initially imagined. We stumbled across one website for plastic surgery in Edmonton which gave the following admonition, “Age is also a consideration. Many surgeons prefer not to perform nose jobs on teenagers until they've completed their growth spurt – around 14 or 15 for girls, a bit later for boys.” http://www.pclsc.ca/procedures.php?p=rhinoplasty. This implies 1) that kids younger than 14 or 15 are seeking such procedures and 2) that teenagers as young as 16 are being given those procedures. Advertising compounded by media messages creates consumers of beauty products and procedures out of very young girls.

The average consumer is the viewer of 600-625 advertisements per day. Assuming eight hours of sleep, that amounts to approximately one ad every forty seconds! Today, young girls are targeted with what is billed as naturally beautiful or universally pleasing, as derived from media advertisements and products. It can be clearly seen as a toddler rampages through an Edmonton Toys ‘r’ Us demanding of her parents that they buy her the latest Sharpay Evans Barbie doll. For those who are unfamiliar, Sharpay is the superficial female character played by Ashley Tisdale in the High School Musical saga. Characters such as hers are leaving young girls wanting to wear make up like their idealized heroes. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDmEMwdIb44. Stewart Hall’s theory of encoding and decoding would argue that this phenomenon is happening because the viewer, the child, is decoding the image through dominant hegemonic reading, accepting the way Sharpay acts in the film in an unquestioning manner, and wanting to be just like her because she has embellished herself with pink, fluffy, sparkly glitz. Young girls idolizing fictional characters and striving to emulate them themselves at a younger and younger age is ironically causing a depletion of childhood years. Marketers target “tweens” (the age group between childhood and adulthood). But, in recent decades the “tween” era of life is getting younger, as marketers are targeting younger age groups: now beginning at ages 5-7. It is a normal part of life to want to grow up fast but is it healthy for young girls to be wanting to alter themselves via cosmetics and permanent procedures done at such a young age when their bodies have not even finished developing? Advertisements, popular “tween” culture and media messages create “cradle to the grave” consumers of beauty products and services.



Advertisements in general use beautiful women who are insanely photo-shopped and airbrushed creating flawless skin, slimmer waists, and higher upper proportions to create the image of the perfect women. We found the same trends looking though fliers and advertisements from Edmontonian clinic websites and beauty centers. It is important to note that on some of the websites we looked at for cosmetic surgeries the girls used for “age reversal” advertisements looked teenaged! The distortion of such images leads girls feeling less competent and believing that the product in the ad will help achieve this “perfect” look. The danger of course is that young women and girls believe that such distorted media images are reality: creating low self-esteem issues that “must be” corrected even with extreme measures such as non-invasive and invasive beauty operations and excessive dieting. Excessive dissatisfaction with their bodies leads many young women to develop disorders such as Body dysmorphia and eating disorders such as Anorexia and Bulemia Nervosa when the “thin ideal” is internalized. And, unfortunately, young girls are increasingly internalizing the thin ideal. In one psychological study that asked young girls what the “ideal woman” looks like, the researchers found that a girl’s view of such a woman is anorexic by diagnostic standards. It is no wonder that girls and young women are increasingly dissatisfied with their appearance. If the average woman in America is 5’4’ 142 pounds and the “perfect model” seen in media images is on average 5’9” 110 pounds, girls are doomed to feel less than perfect. Perfection is constructed to be something that is literally unattainable for most women, and yet it will always be strived for. This ensures that the beauty and cosmetic industries will have a never-ending supply of female consumers.


Over the past decade, beauty products have become increasingly popular and complex, where will they be in another 10 years? At some point we have to ask ourselves when is beauty achieved? Will it ever be achieved or will we constantly be pressured into thinking that the newest techniques in beauty will get us all we desire.