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.
