I recently ran into a commercial spoof that sums up unrealistic beauty standards really wonderfully:
I would love to see this spoof of a make up commercial actually on television. It is a great parody of an advertisement and allows for an effective delivery of its message: beauty standards aren’t realistic. It successfully argues that you need photoshop to live up to the ideals that celebrities and the media are holding up for us.
I have been writing about the “magic tricks” involved in the illusions of Western beauty. This video shows one of the main tricks: digital manipulation. We’re so used to digitally re-touched images, we don’t realize that what we’re seeing is computer fakery. We think that the images we’re seeing are attainable, but it’s often not the case. When we need photoshop in order to live up to (or size down to) the beauty ideal, you know there’s something seriously wrong.
