What Is Beauty?

For this weeks text response blog I read "Social Lubricant: How a Marketing Campaign Became the Catalyst for a Social Debate" by Rob Walker. This article talked about the way women are portrayed in marketing ads. It specifically focused on the new ads from Dove and the changes that these have made. The author describes the new ads featuring the "Dove Girls," who are supposedly more realistic than the majority of female ads.

The author asks the question: are these ads positive or negative. At first, my reaction was to say "of course they're positive." After all, the "fake" women that are in most ads are damaging to what society sees as beauty. But, on the other hand, the author points out that, in the end, theses ads are still ads. They are still trying to promote a product with "practically naked" women.
This  made me think. what's better, ads using "unrealistic women," or one's with "normal" women? The author seems to take the position that the ads with "normal" women are better. He supports this with the reasoning that the ads with "unrealistic" women create unhealthy beauty standards. He goes on to say that they also give too much focus on outward beauty, suggesting that this is most important. When physical beauty is only a small fraction of true beauty. And I agree with this.

When I first started reading this article, I did not think it would be quite as thought provoking as it actually was. The author did a great job packing a lot of good thoughts into such a short article. You never really sit down and think about all the ads out there that use "fake" women to promote a product. I was not really aware of the "campaign for beauty" by Dove until I read this article. It's good to see a company realize the focus of ads nowadays is unhealthy and try to change them. However, the company does sell beauty products, which makes you wonder if this is all just another marketing scheme for the benefit of the company, not women.