‘The whole aim of beauty advertising is to make women feel bad about themselves, inadequate and in need of improvement.’

No one can make a woman feel anything she does not want to feel. Women who get upset because they do not look like models are basically insecure to begin with. Some women are more beautiful than other women and that is a fact. Some are also taller, can run faster, cook better and understand nuclear physics better than other women. No one feels inadequate when someone knows more than them or can do things better than them so why should it bother them that some women look better than them. It is a fact of life that we all have different attributes or skills or even looks. It only becomes a problem when a woman does not accept her own differences and is not comfortable with who she is as a person. Instead of learning acceptance of the wide variety of things that make up a human being some women want to shift the blame onto the advertising or beauty industry or anyone who ‘objectifies’ a woman. If you see a woman just as a sportsperson is that also objectification? Couldn’t you say that the media objectify women when they only focus on their sporting prowess?

The problem is not with beauty; it is that some people cannot just appreciate it for what it is and then move on to the next thing in their lives. It is much easier to blame some one else than it is to take responsibility for your own feelings of inadequacy and do something about changing those.

I disagree phanto. Well, I agree but I think you've missed the point. The gripe is that women are being 'made' (I agree, BS) to pursue an *unrealistic* goal, due to the doctoring of images, make-up, lighting , and selection of models.

My beef is that it is women's fault if (and it's a massive if) they use magazines and media images as a reference point for comparison, rather than the people they see around them every day.

It's a silly as people hating the visual world around them as everything looks more colourful in the pictures in magazines, and complaining their burger doesn't look like it does in the McDonalds advertising.

McDonalds is a good example. I think this beauty industry has standardised in a similar manner as McDonalds. People making frocks have one body type to make for, a small one at that, so it's cheaper. The images of women are standard, designed to appeal to the majority of readers - in this case women, who have decided clothes models have the ideal body shape. More voluptuous ones for men as T&A are more popular with men.

There is a way of standardising to the majority view ie more sales. Best practise, unimaginative architecture, the visual world can be designed for broad-spread appeal. Even music can be created by algorithms to appeal to most humans. Facial features have also been studied in this way.

The problem overlooked is the most basic one. It's not the images, it's the flawed presumption that people aspire to emulate images in magazines rather than real life. It's the Joneses that are the more often used frame of reference.

The cart is before the horse. Rather than wanting women to aspire to be more than just beautiful, there is this obsession with representing everyone as physically beautiful. I'm sorry, but pimples are universally ugly!