Academic literature on the topic 'Advertisement, beauty, woman, beauty ideals'

In this essay, Michelle J. Smith explores the ‘visually spectacular’ advertisements for cosmetics that appeared in late Victorian women’s periodicals (p. 218). Focusing specifically on the Queen (1861–1970) and Woman (1890–1912), she argues that editorial and advertising content were aligned in their treatment of cosmetics, recommending natural beauty over artifice, personal hygiene over self-fashioning. Advertisements figured older actresses as models of natural beauty rather than as practitioners of the cosmetic arts. Meanwhile, editorials, along with the ‘advice provided in advice columns and articles,’ enabled the woman reader to ‘negotiate acceptable use of branded products in tandem with home-made methods and daily attention to a beauty regimen grounded in hygiene’ (p. 229). Cutting-edge cosmetic preparations and technologies of image reproduction were thus used to disseminate rather conventional ideas about women’s health, natural beauty, and artless femininity.

This research study is an exploration of the ways in which a beauty ideal is constructed from the promotion of skin lightening products across social media platforms Instagram and Facebook. In addition, it investigates consumers of skin-lightening products, the social media ‘influence' behind the adverts and their response to these advertisements, in a particular ethnic community: British Bangladeshi. The study through the examination of respondent's skincare regime using photo-elicitation and semi-structured interviews sought to deconstruct their aesthetics through skin colouring products. Combining visual discourse analysis from social media advertisements, the study presents the voices and experiences of the seven women to show how they construct their identities through the ‘fantasy' of whiter skin.

The African roots of womanism can be seen in African women’s social and spiritual formations, such as the West African Sande society. Art historian Sylvia Ardyn Boone examined the social, cultural, and spiritual dimensions of the Sande society in her classic book, Radiance from the Waters: Ideals of Feminine Beauty in Mende Art (1986), published well before the womanist idea was in wide circulation. Yet the Sande-originated ideas, orientations, and practices in Boone’s text help to elucidate the elusive core dimensions of womanism and demonstrate why womanism is the fruit of a distinctly African intellectual genealogy, born of African cosmology. Womanism is, then, a New World vehicle for many of the ideas and dispositions that have historically been preserved and transmitted by such African women’s social and spiritual formations. Inherent in the organization and spirit of these ideas and dispositions is a unique orientation to social and ecological problem solving, rooted in woman-gendered Africanity. This chapter explores not only the connections between the Sande worldview/praxis and womanism but also the life and work of Boone as a unique Black intellectual who made these connections possible.