Analyzing Maggie's Beauty Advertisements

As stated in our proposal, for our final project Maggie and I wanted to respond to female beauty standards in the modern United States. We began by perusing a number of Cosmopolitan magazines (I purchased thirteen issues from the last year or two on the internet). As I read the magazines, I was struck by how overwhelming it was to have advertisement after advertisement thrown in my face, each showing the ‘perfect’ woman. Coincidentally, none of these women looked anything like people I actually know and see on a day to day basis. And it’s not just in magazines. We are bombarded with beauty advertisements constantly—billboards, posters, commercials, online, etc. As I flipped through the magazine, I felt almost judged. All these images of ‘beautiful’ women staring at me from the page, and I could not help but see all the ways I was not like them. After looking through all thirteen magazines, I also realized that the women in the ads did not even seem like people to me—they seemed more like things. They had been reduced to objects to be gawked at and envied. I considered how best to capture these emotions in an artwork and eventually settled on a collage. The busy-ness of it visually I feel expresses the feeling of being overwhelmed and the eyes the feeling of judgement. By cutting the faces apart, I hoped to capture the objectification of the women by reducing them to pieces.

Maggie responded to the magazines by writing a poem dealing with the implied message in the beauty ads—that the reader is ugly.

She focused on what was absent in the advertisements. I was inspired by this idea of absence to make a mask, as they imitate life yet lack life—they are empty and fake. I decided to use paper mache so I could make the mask out of beauty advertisements from the magazines, to indicate how women are encouraged to cover themselves in make-up—to wear a mask. I then chose to decorate the mask with make-up to further drive home the message and give the mask some more

color/vibrancy.
In her poem responding to my collage, Maggie spoke of the mass production of beauty and of the doll-like qualities of the ‘perfect’ women in the ads. In my artwork responding to her poem, I decided to use Barbies as they are mass produced, nearly identical, and, I feel, a representation of the ideal woman in American society. I took the Barbies apart to imply their fabricated nature, and to comment upon their sameness. I laid the Barbies out in an attempt to suggest a factory conveyer belt, and the background is covered in beauty ads to show their importance in the creation and maintenance of beauty standards in the United States. The rough edges and uneven marks on the Barbies indicate the difficulty and pain of trying to reach these beauty standards—to conform to one image of beauty.