When did Beauty Become Unethical?

As a girl, I totally agree with the saying that “shopping is the nature of ladies”. Ladies can always have a lot of things that they need to buy or want to buy. Clothes, shoes, cosmetics, accessories… But why do we need to buy so many things while there are already a bunch of them sitting in our wardrobes? Since we are kept being told that we are not looking good enough.

"Beauty Backlash” pointed out that commercials selling female products, especially cosmetics, are using more and more pretty young models, which makes women feel insecure about they way they look. Seeing those tall, thin, young models with pretty faces, we would always want to become one of them. We might buy the eye shadow just because the model using it has charming bright eyes; we might buy the lip stick just because the model using it has sexy or sweet lips… We might buy all those things just because we want to be as pretty as those models are.

Yet, we can never be as perfect as those models do. Since we can’t use Photoshop to change the shape of our face, eyes, nose, and lips; we can’t get everyone’s best part on our body either. So no matter how much we spend on our “beauty project”, we still can’t reach our goal. Compared with those perfect looking young models, we will finally become lack of self-esteem, and feel upset about ourselves.

Considering how much women could be “hurt” by those perfect models in commercials, are advertisements doing too much to achieve their goals? A lot of things can be done to increase sales and make greater profits without making ladies feeling insecure. Companies can use strategies related to price, quality, brand image and other areas to boost their sales. And consumers can get beauty and confidence that they want. But companies’ appetite seems being too big to be satisfied. They not only want women to consume regularly, they want them to consume every time when new products are launched on the market. Thus, they need to beat down ladies’ confidence again and again, make them feel bad about themselves; so that they would feel they are in need of the new product.

Making use of consumer’s psychological weakness, while designing the promotional campaign, is quite common and reasonable for all types of companies. But the use of perfect and standardized beauty in defeating ladies’ self-esteem, making them feel bad and insecure, is an unethical way. Every girl has the right to be a princess, no matter how they were born to be. Because there are a lot more things than just the out looking that can contribute to our beauty. Yet, companies try to standardize beauty in order to change the society’s value point, and change the definition of “beauty”. This, on one hand, push ladies to worry about their out looking overly. On the other hand, it denies a lot of ladies being beautiful in different ways, and makes them feel like being at the bottom of the ‘beauty world”.

Beauty, as a thing every one is pursuing for, is a miracle in our world. But when it was used overly so that it hurts people’s feeling, it is unethical.