Jean Kilbourne, an American author famous for her exposé about the portrayal of media concerning women. On her advertisement entitled Killing Us Softly, Kilbourne enumerates the ways on how women are portrayed in the media especially in the field of advertising. In order to attract consumers, advertising companies create various propagandas to make their client’s products stand out on the competitive market. Kilbourne stated in her argument that most products presented in various advertisements sell not only the product itself but also the values in the featured ad. “They sell values, they sell images and concepts of love and sexuality; of success, and perhaps more important of normalcy to a great extent they tell us who we are and what we should be.” I strongly agree to Kilbourne’s argument about the women being treated as mere objects or ‘prized trophies’ in advertisements. Kilbourne argues that women are seen as chattels, not as human beings and because of these advertisements, the idea of ‘de-humanizing’ the images of women certainly leads to violence against women by presenting images of women whose body parts are meticulously torn off their respective bodies. Another trick is the idea of surrounding the viewers with perfect female figures which eventually results a drastic influence over their minds about the beauty. Advertisements are made to attract customers but there are times wherein the limits between reality and illusion are merged which creates the illusion of beauty which are then perceived by the people who are watching.
In the second advertisement created by Dove, professional advertising director Tim Piper managed to unveil the secrets behind the beautiful faces in the beauty commercials. Beginning with a single image of a young and average looking woman, the commercial progressed whilst the face of the lady was painted with different kinds of make-up products. Hence, by applying the CRAP principle, first is contrast; the hair dressers and make-up artists were able to contrast the woman’s face from the rest of her body parts such as shoulders and neck. By contrasting, they were able to make her face ‘stand-out’ in order to catch attention from the readers, especially during the photo editing procedure wherein the artist made her neck long enough than its normal size. Next is repetition, in a notable scene from the commercial, first is when the make-up artists repetitively blended all make-up to highlight her nose, sharpen the eyes and thicken the lashes and the brows. In addition to this, the repetitive application of foundation on the woman’s face created a light tanned hue which made her face more appealing than her usual complexion of white. Third is the alignment procedure. This particularly attacks the visual senses which enable the use of photo editing techniques to obtain a balanced alignment between on the facial features. For example, in a scene in the Dove commercial, after the make-up session and pictorial; the woman’s picture was then placed under the hands of an expert photo editor. In the video, viewers can clearly see how the woman’s face was further enhanced by making her neck longer than the actual size, adjusting the eye shape, making the shoulders thinner and re-shaping her face by adjusting it so that the squareness of her jaw will not be prominent. Lastly, is proximity; again this is the same as adjusting and aligning all closest features in order to obtain a desirable result. It’s similar to associating things which are closest with one another. The closer the two things are, the more appropriate they become for aligning procedure whilst things which are distant from each other are most likely to hinder in achieving the desirable result. To generalize the whole thing, because of these editing procedures, the society’s view towards the real beauty are becoming more and more distorted which is why younger women are highly influenced to achieve the ultimate supermodel look by neglecting the right food to become thin and putting too much make-up. As the Dove commercial says, “no wonder that our perception of beauty is distorted,” because the advertisements is constantly bombarding the female audiences with pictures of good looking but edited bodies of females. Advertisements are created to patronize and to promote the products to the consumers but it must not be allowed to dominate a society’s view over the true meaning of female beauty.
Works Cited
Kilbourne, Jean. Killing Us Softly 4: Advertising's Image Of Women With Jean Kilbourne. 2010. Web. 30 May. 2014.
Piper, Tim. Dove Evolution. 2006. Web. 30 May. 2014.
