After the recent release—and subsequent backlash—of Dove’s Real Beauty Sketches, it seems only fitting to talk about beauty
advertisements. While Dove’s sketches were criticized for purporting to
question ideals of beauty while actually reinforcing a stereotypically thin,
white, and blonde kind of beauty, they are redolent of a trend in advertising
that has been around since the advent of fashion magazines in the late 19th
century: beauty products are just that—beauty
products, aimed to render one beautiful even as they create the very standard
of beauty.
In the
last few months I have spent a lot of time with 1920s & 30s issues of
American Vogue, and one thing that
stands out is the intersection between beauty product (or article of clothing,
or a fashionable hat, or even a luxury car) and a sense of individuality, of
interiority.
