Advertisement Analysis: Special K And Fashion Magazine

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Advertisement Analysis Essay In today’s society, more than ever there is a great importance placed on beauty. In fact beauty is often associated with self worth, especially among women. This idea that beauty is more important than anything else is prominent in the media, specifically advertisements. Advertisements present ideas of beauty that women think they must conform to in order to be beautiful. This essay will analyze two advertisements from the winter 2016 issue of Fashion Magazine. Both advertisements present very different ideas of beauty. The Erin Tracey ad reproduces the dominant ideologies of beauty, which are traditionally white and thin beautiful women. On the other hand the Special K advertisement challenges these hegemonic …show more content…

Firstly, the model has a larger body type. This is very different from most models depict in mass media. Women of large body types are often seen as undesirable. However even thought she is a different body type than normally seen the ad still reproduces dominant ideologies about body image. The text on the ad reads: “My belly is from the kids. My booty is from the gym” The ad is telling women they should be confident in their bodies no matter how they look, however at the same time it’s placing her importance on her body image. Stating that she has a nice “booty” is placing importance on her body. Once again reproducing dominant ideologies about beauty norms. In addition to her being a different body type the model is also black. As stated before it is very rare that you see black women depicted as beauty icons in mass media. At study about LIFE magazine showed that from 1936 to 2000 the number of black people depicted in the magazine ads went from just above 1% to 12% (Grady, 2007, p. 225). While the increase is good this is still a very small percentage of racialised people being presented in the mass media. All types of women are told to conform to beauty norms but black women in particular are told to conform to white heteronormativity (Sanger, 2009, p. 138). This ad in particular conforms to white heteronormativity because of her hair. As Sanger explains: “It seems that little black girls are… excepted to regulate and control their unruly hair” (Sanger, 2009, p. 143). This is seen in the Special K ad as the model has long and straight hair that is clearly not her natural hair. Since black women have been told over and over again that their hair is not beautiful they conform to the hegemonic ideas of beauty seen in mass

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