I think that many of the products being marketed towards women play upon their innate or natural fears. Fear is a natural emotion , but by various accounts, women are naturally more fearful than men, so this strategy can become quite lucrative.

Read this magazine to learn how to be a beautiful woman, and such magazines then compel the reader to buy the magazine again. Buy this product or you won’t be judged beautiful, and by buying such products the purchaser is compelled to purchase similar products again.

The question is, does repeatedly playing upon the person’s natural fears actually amplify those fears beyond normal or healthy levels?

Nearly all editors of women’s magazines are female, and most of women’s beauty products are sold by female staff. However I think that there are other people in society, (outside the beauty industry), who have also learnt that it can be very advantageous to manipulate women’s natural fears.

The beauty industry also pumps out the lie that personal beauty, image and appearance are essentially self-directed and self-centred, rather than relationship-oriented. That is to say another way of understanding beauty is the high comprehensive regard, including physical and personal, one person or a group of persons have for another. Beauty then is something a person experiences as a result of being highly regarded by others. You could almost call it love. I am beautiful because others love me. It is when we erect conditions for loving each other that fears arise. If we are capable of loving and regarding each other highly without conditions then we are perhaps on our way to understand that while beauty is in the eye of the beholder, beauty is more readily experienced when the one beheld is loved unconditionally by the beholder.

By the way I love the advertisements in the right-hand side-bar...

n0rm5kj,

Exquisitely wonderful sentiments on the nature of true beauty.

The beauty industry certainly contributes to ageism - to the point where some people are obsessed about not looking old (such as Hollywood actresses) and spend a fortune vainly trying to cosmetically hide ageing signs. Wrinkles, of course, are not going to kill you and looking 50 when you're actually 60 is not going to make a jot of difference to your health and when you will actually die.

If, and this is a big if, people started taking pride in looking their actual age, much of the beauty industry would go to the wall. But sadly many of us have internalised the view that looking old is bad and hence more profits go to plastic surgeons when the money could be better spent.

I agree fully DavidJs. The following is from the book “Spin Sisters” by Myrana Blyth (who spent 20 yrs as editor of a number of top selling women’s magazines in the US, before retiring and blowing the whistle on the lot of it)

"How many of us have raced out to buy J.Lo's mascara or Gisele's blusher after seeing the makeup brand credited under the glowing photo of a celeb or model in a magazine? Well, you can stop reading and racing. Makeup artists use what they want during a photo shoot, and the editors, long after the picture has been taken, write the credits to please the advertisers. The small type under each picture, which tells you the name of the foundation and lipstick that the model is supposedly wearing is rarely accurate. Truth in beauty and fashion journalism? Not exactly."

"In my study of women's magazines, my researcher and I found that during the three-year period we tracked, there were 425 articles about weight loss and body problems--most of them in diet stories, fitness advice, and fashion tricks for camouflaging your flaws. Not surprisingly, 97 percent of the issues we looked at featured a diet or body-improvement article on their covers. The idea that a woman could actually be happy with her body and its supposed imperfections was only mentioned 12 times in the three-year period."

Combining women’s magazines with the cosmetic industry and the fashion industry, then they are multi-billion industries based largely on hoax. The best thing someone can do for their skin is to drink plenty of water, stay out of the sun and stop reading women’s magazines which are purposely designed to make women feel anxious and fearful, and will most likely give them unnecessary stress lines.

However this giant hoax can seriously affect people when it develops into a phobia regards getting older, or it creates discrimination of older people