Sex/uality Artifacts

For my artifact I found several pictures from google images after I searched “aging and beauty”. When I first searched the term I thought I might find a picture of an older person that might lead to a website or article I could use to go along with the “Feeling Old and Ugly? Look Again” article. Instead what I found was a bunch of pictures of younger women who were being compared to older women, or older women who were shown trying to remove their own skin to reveal the younger women beneath. This link, Aging and Beauty, shows the pictures that I found in my search. These pictures showed a woman unzipping her old and wrinkled face to reveal the smooth young one underneath, side by side comparisons of young and old women, one woman peeling off her older face, an old woman looking into a mirror and seeing a younger version of herself, and many more. These pictures only took me a few minutes to find after I started looking for them. The fact that when you search aging and beauty and it gives you pictures of older women trying to look young again and not older women who are beautiful or happy was very disappointing to me. And the few women who they did show that were actually smiling and happy were almost always either actresses and models or were on ads for some kind of anti-aging cream. When you looked at these pictures that came up it made it easy to think that the only way to be beautiful when you are older is to look young.

In the article the author, Margaret M. Gullette, talks about this.  Gullette says, “Ad campaigns only exits to get us to want their product badly. By giving us views of younger models they create a critical comparative eye”. This is exactly what all of these pictures were doing. They put young and old together and showed young as being preferable to old. Not many people looking at these pictures will think “oh, I want to look like the older woman” because that is not what is show as being desirable. Cosmetics and other beauty product manufactures  are not going to want women to be comfortable in their own skin. If a woman is comfortable in her own skin then the companies do not make money. It is in their best interest to make women feel bad about themselves and how they naturally look so that they can make the most profit.

Gullette, M. (2005, August 4). Feeling Old and Ugly? Look Again. Retrieved December 12, 2015, from http://www.alternet.org/story/23885/