Beauty Standards, and Advertisements Trying to Remove It: Partly Agree and Partly Disagree

(2020 Advanced English Reading 1)

 

I think the advertisements suggested later can be effective. Actually, the advertisements we saw at first, such as advertisements for Dior, magazines regarding men’s health, and so on, don't show the shape of an average person. It’s rather the type of people who have low body weight, which is also not that good for health. This makes the gap between the real way people look and the way the advertisements force them to look.

This is why, once in Korea, there was a humorous saying like “Hey, customer, she’s Jun, Ji-hyun.” When people see Jun, Ji-hyun or many other entertainers who are accepted to be the beauty standard are advertising some beauty products, they say that those products look good because the ones using the products are those beautiful people.

But the truth is that people buy those products with beautiful models, it’s just a fact as we can see in the exact numbers. Unless all the people’s mindset toward those beauty standards change wholly, this structure cannot be changed, which makes the suggested advertisements less effective than ones with beautiful models.

 

+) But I don’t agree with changing all the thin models into thick ones, because it’s also the way people show their repulsion to those thin people. Ture, there exist people who have low, average and high body weight, and it doesn’t mean that they should be all integrated into the average weight and high weight ones. There might exist people who want to be healthy and have muscles through the process of losing weight. Saying that people should not be bound to the way they look does not necessarily mean that they should get fat. True, both losing weight and gaining weight too much are not a good phenomena.