Media, Makeup, & Framing

     I came across an ad for Maybelline New York and I thought the woman portrayed in the ad was very beautiful. However, there was one quote in the ad that stood out to me the most. The quote said the following “Maybe she’s born with it. Maybe it’s Maybelline?”. Morally to me, that quote was not correct it was wrong because it made me perceive that the woman may not be beautiful even if she does look beautiful in the photo. Make-up should not change how a woman looks, but it should enhance her natural features. From what Maybelline stated though, they may just be the reason that the woman in the ad looks so beautiful.      In today’s mass media there are all sorts of videos on Instagram and youtube on how to use makeup to make your nose look smaller or how to make your cheekbones look bigger and eyes bigger etc. Yet today there is a correlation between thinking like this, women think that it’s okay to try and change how they naturally look rather than accept themselves. Mass media has placed a load on women to think they may not look beautiful without their make-up and wearing make-up is the only way that they will feel beautiful and be accepted socially. I think culturally the quote Maybelline used seems reasonable and expected, yet it may have some ethical issues. Nevertheless, since it has been framed so well in society as an acceptance for women it is not something that young women will notice right away when they are going through social media. The reason I label this as framing is that make-up is not the only way to make women feel beautiful, but media tells them it’s all about the face and how beautiful the facial features are. It will be something that will be thrown at them defining how they should be as women and feeling like being natural is not acceptable in today’s culture.

     For example, women my age consider makeup as part of the culture per say at a wedding the bride is expected to be wearing a nice complimenting amount of make-up and moms expect the bride to wear make-up as well just like anyone else in that bride’s audience. If she does not wear the makeup she will be judged as though maybe she was running late or maybe she doesn’t even care about the wedding, but media is defining what a woman should look like to us. It’s not that we think the bride made the incorrect choice. It is that the media told us what the correct choice should be. Women’s reception analysis about makeup has been affecting them since they were in their early teens which is a very sensitive time for those young girls and how they feel about their appearance. They chose the low hanging fruit as their target audience, in other words, those young women in the most primal years for them. Mass media very cleverly framed what beauty should be to woman and women have not noticed this right away, but the make-up industry wants to make sales and aim at their target audience. Yet if women noticed the framing and how there are moral issues then those women may be stuck in the spiral of silence because they would not want to be viewed as the odd woman out for not wanting to wear make-up.