Beauty Advertising affecting Middle-Aged Women

The advertising industry has been famous for using young beautiful and handsome models to portray their product. In beauty advertisements, the women portraying the product are usually young female adults. Due to this fact, many assume that the main audience targeted is women around that similar age group. However, middle-aged women also experience the effect of beauty advertisements, if not more so than young adults. Middle-aged women, between the ages of 40-50, experience menopause along with body changes, such as wrinkles and weight gain, which make these women more perceptible to becoming hooked by advertisements.

The advertising industry has been developing more useful tactics for making information easier for the audience to remember and gain a deeper connection with the product they are trying to sell. “One of the signature strengths of the advertising industry lies in its ability to transform seemingly mundane objects into highly desirable products.” (Trampe 1030). Advertisements provide a sense of lower self esteem to those who want them, especially women, compared to if one was to see a product on the shelf of a supermarket; the effect would not be remotely the same. This is able to happen due to the understanding of the human brain and the research Paul Messaris conducted to indicate how advertisements affect a person’s brain. The brain works by connecting pictures used in advertisements to visual information in the real world (3). This causes the memories of advertisements to stick to the brain, which in turn when one sees the product again, will remember the advertisement. For information to stick to the brain, the advertisement is most effective when incorporating these five areas.

How women think about themselves and their skin has been changing over the years, especially once menopause begins. In a test by Seiya, Nomura, Hayashi, and Hasegawa, groups of young, middle-aged, and elderly women were asked questions concerning their skin. The results were that younger women were more worried about transparent skin while middle-aged and elderly women worried more about skin-roughness (Seiya 1). Then, in a research study conducted by Naomi Wolf, the main worry from women, young and middle-aged, was said to be the idea of getting older due to the fact they would be getting wrinkles (1).  Menopause has become an underlying reason for the way women are affected by beauty advertisements. “For women, in particular, the midlife experience and its assumed crisis have been framed using a ‘loss paradigm,’ with an emphasis upon women's midlife losses of reproductive capacity, the mothering role, sexuality, youth, and appearance” (Ogle 2). In Ogle’s article, he study’s European women and how they think during this period of time. What he found out was that women were changing from caring about others around them to caring more about themselves. In particular, these women started caring more about the way they looked and if it matched what society wanted (2).

(pressure reasons and reason for self esteem loss). The pressure women are under to become more like models is starting at a young age and then carrying through with them for the rest of their lives. Information was found that spouses and advertisements were saying women should look more like models, which in turn gave rise to women feeling they needed to as well (Shields). Based on the authors own experiences, the realization was that people react differently to what society would dub “pretty” people. The outcome was that “pretty” people were giving more attention and having others want to be friends with them because of their looks, pushing aside others who they did not find as “pretty.” From Authors Gurari, Hetts, and Strube, it was discovered that women were automatically comparing themselves to others around them. This showed the idea of women losing self esteem. Then, Trampe, Stapel, and Siero conduct a research project on how attractiveness-relevant products in advertising affect ones emotions.  The result was advertisers using models reduces self esteem because of the pressure to be like that of the model.

 

*This is a very basic outline of my essay. I tried to group the information into different categories I felt might flow together, if there is something that does not, please let me know.