Cosmetic companies like Max Factor and Revlon influenced beauty standards with powerful advertisements that included vivid prints and bright colours. Girls were shown posing against intensely pigmented backgrounds with their perfect hairstyles, their perfect outfits and their perfect smiles.
While the ads showed one thing, reality painted an entirely different picture. Few print ads featured women of colour, and when they were included, they often modelled for beauty brands specifically targeted to their racial demographics. Additionally, women were marginalised in sexist ads that portrayed them as men-chasing damsels who needed superhero products to make them look pretty and feel accepted.
During the XVI and XVII centuries, artists attacked the glorious image of the ideal body and they
started to represent imperfect and distorted bodies. Then, with the birth of photography in the XIX
century and its massive expansion in the next century, new problematics and questions about
corporal image arose. The body’s image turned into an object of consumption of easy access,
generating a complex social dynamic that still continues. The body’s use in advertising, from the beginning of the XX century, presented an ideal body, generally the feminine body. Women attempted to follow the proposed fashion by advertising posters (beautiful women must have wide hips, a thin waist, and an abundant bust, and they used corsets to adjust their bodies to the beauty parameter imposed by society.
With the beginning of feminist manifestations in the twenties, women “rebelled”: they let down their hair and hid their curves with “flapper” dresses, turning into androgynous beings. After the economic crisis, a decade later, fashion changed again: the curves in women over-evaluated as a
representation of the feminine, fertility and well-being. The slender woman started to be seen as
sickly in that moment. This vision of the feminine body changed again during the sixties, when the thin British model Twiggy turned into the ideal of beauty. Feminist manifestations to denounce women’s position in the society then arose. The case allows us to refer to the creation of stereotypes of the feminine body, and quoting Craing Owens: “The stereotype is an instrument to subjugate; its function is to produce ideological subjects that can be inserted softly within institutions, governments, economies and of a more crucial way, in the sexual identity”. Happiness, channeled through beauty; “Ugly people do not know happiness”, that is what millions of advertisements try to say, which encourages us to be or to turn into beautiful beings”, has caused big troubles in the world since fashion began to idealise the human body, making this a malleable, influenceable, and extremely vulnerable substance, at the beginning directed to women, and currently to the masculine gender too.
But a new report published by The NPD Group found that "consumer attitudes have changed, and beauty is viewed differently than it was in years past." The report said that while spending grew among the U.S. prestige beauty market, the fewest amount of people purchased beauty products in 2014 than in the last six years. Karen Grant, global beauty industry analyst, added that women may be finding fulfilment once associated with beauty products from other experiences. Perhaps sensing the shift in consumers' mindsets, beauty companies have branded their messages differently than ever before. For example, Make Up For Ever released un-retouched ads in 2011, and Dove launched its "Love Your Curls" campaign just this year. Both examples challenge unrealistic beauty standards and promote self-acceptance.
