In the early twentieth-century, women are not too sexualised, but they are objectified. Even though men are not present in the advertisement, the idea of male gaze is omnipresent: women should look good to seduce men and please them. We also get the idea that putting one's beauty forward is a skill - women have the knowledge. During the war, advertisement is settling more and more in society's consumption habits and marketers are eager to make the most of the situation. Military vocabulary is used to market beauty product to women, urging them to do their part in the war, but there is another side to that practice: women's morale needed boosting too, and that came through taking care of oneself and staying pretty like nothing had changed. After the war came a time of prosperity, which meant hyper-consumption. As underlined by Renta Barnos, advertisement in the post-war era makes very little of women. The perfect family model shown in advertisement shows women as housewives above all else: their sole purpose in life is to be a good wife, a good mother, and beauty is defined as what pleases the husband.
This paradigm changes a little towards the end of the century. The housewife goes away as marketers realise women are more and more independent: Renta Barnos' book Marketing to Women around the world (1989) was a huge success, as it pointed out the mistakes and problems in marketing and gave solutions for a more efficient way of advertising to women. They are a market, they are eager to buy and consume, but not all in the same way. Very few of them identify to the housewife trope, and they wish to see more independent women portrayed.
That is when cosmetics advertisement shift: first of all it addresses its message to younger women, in the successful attempt to create a new market. Then, it also creates the archetype of the perfect, independent but desirable woman. Women are shown working, being active, out of the house... but the way they are represented is still problematic: more objectified and sexualised than ever, women are shown as shallow and fake, but at the same time unapologetically confident and perfect.
Another problem throughout the history of cosmetics advertising is representation: marketers are showing caucasian, tall, thin, white, idealised women. However, advertisement works with identification (Alan, 2001) and the inadequacy between the beauty standard shown in mainstream images and the reality of women's appearance is problematic.
In November 2018, Youtuber and beauty vlogger Em Ford worked in collaboration with Prof. Vincent Walsh of UCL’s Institute of Cognitive Neurosciences on a project called Redefine:Pretty. They interviewed women with different skin conditions – acne, vitiligo, scars… – who struggle with self-image. They showed them images of themselves, images of models, both wearing makeup or no makeup, asked them to think of the perfect woman, and analysed their cerebral responses. The striking result is that, when seeing an image of themselves without makeup and then imagining perfection, they show activity in the amygdala that is very close to PTSD and Anxiety disorder. In the interviews, these women emphasise how mainstream images of beauty make them feel ugly by comparison. Em Ford addresses the issue more directly: she states that the brands she works with, all the major beauty companies, are the problem. Their representation of women is unrealistic, idealised, and yet has become a standard for beauty that is unattainable for women, who in turn develop complexes and disorders.
This issue is addressed by activist and actress Jameela Jamil, who founded the "I Weigh" movement earlier this year to encourage women to value themselves through achievements and personality rather than appearance. In August 2018 she was invited by Krishnan Guru-Murthy on his podcast on Channel 4 to talk about her campaign and her fight against current beauty standards. She states that "women are bombarded with self-hatred" and conditioned to focus on appearance rather than anything else, and to think of a certain beauty standard as the only 'right' way to be attractive. Later on she approaches the subject of airbrushing - the professional practice of spraying a thin but covering layer of foundation on someone's skin to make it look smoother and flawless, with the possibility to emphasise shadows and highlights and therefore slightly change the appearance of the person. She calls it "one of the foulest things to have happened to women" and confides that she had, throughout her career, to specifically ask not to be airbrushed. This practice is often compared to Photoshop, as it can create the same effect of perfection in reality. However it is yet another way of stating that beauty can only be achieved through artificial means and is not naturally attainable, while still making it look real. This then create complexes in people who compare themselves to enhanced images of other people they think are naturally perfect, or at least better-looking than them.
Jamil also tackles the problem of skin-whitening: "People have made me look white in so many of the magazines and campaigns I've shot for (...) to make me look more acceptable, perhaps, to a caucasian audience". Making people look caucasian is a form of white-washing, and is a way to negate ethnicity or race, or appropriate it for a white audience to relate to the person more. Jamil explains how this, and any alteration of her appearance by editors, affect her mental health and the health of other women: "It sends a message to me (...) that I am not good enough as I am".
Jameela Jamil is very active on her Twitter account and does not hesitate to speak up and denounce toxicity when she sees it. Her involvement in such matters have earned her a place in BBC's list of 100 women of the year, and on December 7th, the 'Achievement of the Year' award from Women in Film & Television UK.
Airbrushing of people in magazines and especially in advertisements shouldn’t be legal. Here I make my case for why I feel so strongly about this. Thanks for the space @bbc https://t.co/LFlDLaQQ3a
— Jameela Jamil (@jameelajamil) 2 décembre 2018
An example of Photoshop being weaponised against women: This is how we portray men in their 50s on magazine covers and women in their 50s. Look at the difference. Men who age are sexy in HD. Women mostly just shouldn’t dare age. Men can celebrate the inevitable, we must fear it. pic.twitter.com/XKykaZuiYf
— Jameela Jamil (@jameelajamil) 2 décembre 2018
Photoshop in advertising and magazines is so often used in ways that are ageist, ableist, fatphobic, racist and deeply sexist. It does more harm than good. We are making people almost allergic to the mere sight of normal human features. This only ends badly.
— Jameela Jamil (@jameelajamil) 2 décembre 2018
Beauty vlogger Nyma Tang has created a series of videos called 'The Darkest Shade', in which she tests the darkest shades of skin cosmetics brands can offer. Other vloggers have done the same thing, trying to show how difficult it is for darker skin tones to have the same range of choice as white people.
Fenty has answered a need for more diversity in makeup, advertisement and marketing. Its instagram account features women of color, women who are different from mainstream beauty standards, and women who are not professional models - consumers, who share pictures of themselves wearing Fenty on social media. The success of Fenty Beauty created an increase in diversity: brands are now emphasising the fact that they offer a wide range of skin tones, they tend to be more inclusive, diverse, and to address as many different people as possible.