Blog Post #3

Most of the advertisements I came across were pushing beauty standards and were aimed at women in particular. In today’s society, women are constantly being force fed and influenced to pursue a certain standard or image, much like the ones they say in everyday advertisements. For instance, there was an article I came across were a woman had laid out her outfits for each day of the week.  In another, there was a woman author who wrote about how people were calling her “brave” and admiring her authenticity of herself by refusing to dye her hair and cover up the gray hairs she had. Many of the advertisements I came across were beauty products such as cologne or makeup or fashion items. There were also articles that talked about weight loss and slimming down products as well. The advertisements I came across were mostly marketed towards young women and there always seemed to be a sexual component tied in with the ad, which indicates that there is a male point of view invested in these ads as well. These ads were meant to appeal to the self confidence levels of regular, everyday women and were aimed to make them feel bad about themselves so they can go out and purchase these products.  The magazines definitely had a bias when it came to the levels of beauty and were communicating a message that says if you don’t use our specific brand of products, you are not attractive. The ads specifically used attractive spokespeople and celebrities, such as Blake Lively, to market towards their target audience. In my own opinion, I believe that having one or two of these kinds of advertisements would not have as big of an impact on the women’s target market. However, when every single ad is pushing out a specific standard of beauty, it becomes a problem. The repetition of these kinds of images on a constant basis is what’s driving these astronomical levels of beauty standards in modern society. I think articles such as the weight loss article I mentioned earlier are the kinds of ads we need in today’s world. It promoted a positive outlook on everyday body image issues and it gave its readers a sense of hope. That while, yes, they may not look like the women in the advertisements, they can still set and achieve their own goals by looking at the real life role models they read about it.