Singer fuels backlash against manufactured ‘perfection’ in ads

August 4, 2014 by admin
Filed under Lingerie Events

The culture of altering one’s digital image isn’t going away – it’s getting a boost. Beauty Mirror, a new app by ModiFace, allows users to edit their look instantly. As they look into the camera, users can enlarge the eye, make the skin look clear, reduce acne and make the face thinner.

It has gotten more than 18 million views and gone viral since it was uploaded to Vevo several weeks ago. “Try,” Colbie Caillat’s newest music video, is being lauded by many viewers for its message of accepting oneself. Its images of girls and women, including Caillat, going from glammed-up to barefaced, along with lyrics that urge women to “take your make up off / Let your hair down / Take a breath / Look into the mirror” are the latest salvo in the backlash against manipulated images of beauty in magazines and other media.

More celebrities like Caillat, researchers and companies are adding to the clamor for images of real beauty instead of contrived versions. Beyond mere discourse, a growing number of women are taking action to counter the practice of digitally altering photographs of girls and women to create flawless faces and altered body parts.

“Researchers and activists have been concerned about the impact of idealized images of female beauty for quite some time now – decades even,” said Renee Engeln, a psychologist and body image researcher at Northwestern University, where she directs the Body and Media Lab.

“What seems new is that anger about these images and their impact has started to go mainstream,” she said. “The concern is no longer limited to a relatively small pool of feminists and academic researchers. Thanks in part to the power of social media, what we’re seeing in the past few years is that examples of ridiculous Photoshopping can quickly go viral, as can a variety of more positive messages about body image and beauty standards.”

The effect of manufactured images should not be ignored, according to Engeln. “We have piles of empirical evidence documenting that exposure to extremely thin, highly airbrushed images of women is linked with depression, eating disorders, shame, and guilt,” she said.

Although women are aware that the images are manipulated on websites, magazines and television, the separation between fact and fantasy in photographs of women related to fashion and beauty is amorphous, according to researcher, Meredith Jones, a media and cultural studies scholar at the University of Technology in Sydney.

“Photoshopped images remind us that while it is easy to naïvely conceive of technologies of visual media (especially photography) as able to show actual bodies and objects, closer analysis reveals that rather than being able to represent fact, they create what we might call ‘reality-hybrids,’” she wrote in her paper titled “Media-Bodies and Photoshop.”

“These images/bodies are boundary-crossers,” she added. “Neither fully fabricated nor fully connected to fleshy life, they are part of two worlds.”

Sometimes, it takes personal experience with the dicey divide between what’s real and artificial to speak up, even if it’s in a song. In an interview with Elle.com, Caillat said the constant pressure to appear a certain way all the time became the catalyst for “Try.” The music video shows that her camera-ready look involves adding a tremendous amount of artifice and digital tweaking and that she’s just as comfortable with being makeup-free.

Like “Try,” John Legend’s “You and I” is an anthem on real-life beauty. The music video debuted last month and features a montage of women and girls of all ages, shapes, sizes and races. One part of the video shows a woman who undresses to show the aftermath of a mastectomy.

The attention and the image boost that a company gets for taking a stand against idealized portrayals of beauty have been lost on the fashion and beauty industries until recently.

Dove soap often was a solitary player in this realm for a better part of the past decade and has made money on its real beauty campaigns. Sales rose from $2.5 billion 10 years ago to $4 billion today, according to Advertising Age. This year, other fashion and beauty companies and retailers are entering the fray through advertising and marketing efforts:

• Bongo clothing is launching this month new fall ads titled “100 percent natural,” featuring Vanessa Hudgens, whose fashion photos are not retouched.

• JCPenney featured five mannequins with bodies based on real people in the windows of its Manhattan Mall location in New York last month.

• Aerie, the lingerie division of American Eagle Outfitters, announced this year that its ads of young women would involve “no retouching our girls and no supermodels.” One of its T-shirts has the slogan “Love me, don’t retouch me.”