What Causes Women Obessed With Makeup

Nosotros're bombarded on a daily basis with images of ideal beauty. These images testify upward so oftentimes in our daily lives that it's piece of cake to forget how new they are; that 150 years ago nearly women didn't see whatever photographs of other women -- much less a daily avalanche of Photoshopped advertisements.

Having so many ways to showcase beauty and personal self-expression is awesome. But when nigh mainstream images push one narrow delineation of beauty, it also suggests that women who don't look similar that are inadequate.

When you think about it, women are facing a daily visual battle unprecedented in history:

Unless yous were really wealthy, you wouldn't accept fifty-fifty had a mirror prior to the late-19th century!

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Checking yourself out used to be expensive! According to Carla Rice'southward book, Becoming Women, merely the wealthy could beget a mirror, which cost the equivalent of a luxury car. Also, well-nigh glass surfaces were wonky and uneven, so your appearance could vary dramatically from mirror to mirror, according to Kathy Peiss in Promise In A Jar. Peiss says that many people didn't really know what they looked like until the belatedly 19th century, when glass mirrors became a common presence.

The commencement widely-available images of American women were in fashion magazines.

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In Carnival on the Folio, Isabelle Lehuu writes that commercial depictions of women's manner first became popular in the U.S. in the early on 19th century. These manus-colored engravings showcased the fashions of the time, rather than individual women. At the time, makeup was associated with prostitution, cosmetics were homemade and too much concern with concrete beauty was considered vain.

By the 1860s, photography became widely available to average Americans -- and with it, new anxiety about looking good.

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By this time, heart-class Americans could beget to have their portraits taken at studios. Co-ordinate to Peiss, this was the first time many Americans had a permanent, fixed image of what they objectively looked like, and they were often depressed by what they saw. Ane photography manual noted that the photograph chosen more attention to women'southward facial features and began supplying makeup at their studios. Celebrity photos hit the marketplace; Americans would buy photos of their favorite celebrities and even include them in their family unit photo albums.

In the late 19th-century, the growth of mass media created an explosion of imagery, the well-nigh popular of which was the beautiful, young American adult female.

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In the belatedly 19th century, women'south magazines started being mass-produced and widely available. To compete in the growing market, editors began featuring "Cover Girls" on their magazine covers. The most famous was the "Gibson Daughter," shown higher up. The Gibson Girl is considered the outset nationwide paradigm of the ideal American woman, and her confront was mass-produced everywhere from scarves to prc to wallpaper.

In the 1920s, women became the key targets of the booming advertising industry. By 1930, women said ads made them feel badly about themselves.

Spending on advertising ballooned throughout the 1910s and 20s, and virtually of it targeted women. In the past, dazzler regimes were generally a pastime of wealthy women; '20s beauty advertisements established it equally a goal and even mandatory duty of all womankind. Every bit a 1924 ad put it: "Unless you are one woman in a thou, y'all must utilize powder and rouge."

Ads equated dazzler with love and social status; blackness women were targeted with advertisements selling unsafe skin lighteners as a means to social advancement. Ads used imagery that encouraged women subconsciously to compare themselves to models, and to see their own bodies as "things to be created competitively against other women," as Stuart Ewen writes in "Captains Of Consciousness."

The Hollywood film industry increasingly divers the paradigm of the ideal American woman.

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Hollywood films created new standards of attractiveness, particularly as the increasingly pop glamorous Hollywood close-upward made actors' facial features, and their makeup, more noticeable. Throughout the '30s, more and more American women bought celebrity-endorsed cosmetics and Hollywood beauty how-to-manuals in the hopes of looking similar their favorite starlets. Makeup, once considered tacky, was at present glamorous. Peiss says that by 1940, "The attractive, made-upwardly adult female bespoke the American manner of life." The US government even declared lipstick a wartime necessity.

In the '40s and '50s, the television receiver brought moving images of glamorous actresses and beauty commercials into the home.

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Proven to be peculiarly effective in marketing beauty products, the corrective manufacture poured coin into its Boob tube commercials. Cosmetics sales boomed, tons of new products were invented and beauty products were increasingly marketed to teens and tweens, ofttimes at schools or youth groups. TV also made dazzler pageants into worldwide events -- the search for the pretty face was now an manufacture. Marilyn Monroe embodied the beauty ideal of the moment. Beauty had truly become a major goal for the American woman.

From the '60s onward, the female body became increasingly exposed, and subject area to increased scrutiny.

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Images of women became slimmer everywhere, from Vogue fashion spreads and Miss America pageants to Hollywood movies and average women were encouraged to strive for this look. While women take always been subject to strict torso-epitome standards, women were at present exposed to and then many more images of an ideal body on a daily basis. According to Naomi Wolf'south The Beauty Myth, beauty magazines faced with low sales in the late '60s shifted their focus from fashion to the female torso, and betwixt 1968 and 1972, the number of diet-related manufactures grew by 70 percent. Media obsession with thinness took a cost: Wolf cites two studies that showed that the number of teenage girls who thought they were fatty grew from l percentage in 1966 to fourscore per centum by 1969.

From the '70s on, images of women also became increasingly sexualized.

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From the '70s and on, women in advertisements became increasingly objectified and wore less and less clothing. Meanwhile, the gap between models' weights and that of the average American woman's continued to increase. By the '90s, women were most typically playing the role, and looking the role, of a sexually-available object, everywhere from music videos to tv commercials, from magazines to primetime television.

And the beautiful women depicted were still predominately white.

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While women of color were creating their own creative images, the primary cultural beauty standard was always presented as white. As Maxine Leeds Craig writes in Own't I a Beauty Queen?, "Before 1974, every Vogue comprehend had featured a white woman, before 1983, every Miss America was white." The idiot box and motion picture industries were similarly whitewashed. However, many women of color bankrupt down barriers to gain visibility in the mainstream civilisation, like supermodel Donyale Luna, the first black woman to appear on the cover of Vogue. Although mainstream media began to become slightly more diverse from the '70s on, women of color still tended to be hyper-sexualized in ads and films and were often depicted to announced more than "white."

In the '90s, Photoshop created a new form of feminine perfection, erasing natural body fat, signs of age or any perceived blemishes.

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Photoshop programs were start invented in the '90s, and were used to create artistic, futuristic images. By 1995, a retouching was ubiquitous in mainstream ads, making women announced impossibly thin, with impossibly smoothen, poreless pare. In 1985, i in 3 women said they were unhappy with their advent in a Psychology Today survey. When asked the same question in a 1993 survey, one in two women felt that way.

Today, women are exposed to more digitally-altered media than ever.

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Yous know the drill: We're surrounded by images of women that are mostly underweight, mostly white, and oft hyper-sexualized, at younger and younger ages. Adding social media into the mix, women are put in the position to compare themselves on a daily basis, not but to celebrities and models, just to their peers. everyday comparing themselves to friends and celebrities (who may even be photoshopping their photos.) It's a constant bicycle of comparison and "comeback," fueled by the multi-billion dollar diet, plastic surgery and cosmetics industries.

Those visual comparisons seem to appear everywhere you look. And that tin can make cultivating positive torso image seem hard. But awesome women are challenging the tired standards of dazzler sold by the mainstream and fighting to create new standards of beauty. This work questions the way our dazzler culture marginalizes women of color and shames women who aren't stick-thin.

These images aid counter the daily barrage of media images we all face, and serve as an important reminder that it'due south our culture -- not our bodies -- that needs a makeover.