Synthesizing Research on the Beauty Industry

7 Ways The Beauty Industry Convinced Women That They Weren’t Good Enough

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Etsy

   The economic principle I researched was People generally respond to incentives in predictable ways / Institutions are the “rules of the game” that influence choices
     SYNTHESIZING RESEARCH  ON How does the beauty industry use cultural values and customs to create incentives?

    The beauty industry has drastically changed over the past century by having a more diverse consumer base to featuring more realistic expectations of what it means to be beautiful. However, makeup companies in the past have used cultural institutions such as colorism, societal expectations, and imperialism to further the western agenda of what it means to be beautiful.

     Before mainstream makeup companies such as CoverGirl, Lancôme, and L’Oreal started to make products geared towards brown skinned customers, Iman, Black Opal, and Black Radiance, well-known ethnic makeup companies, came to the rescue and fulfilled their bases needs for makeup fitted for their skin tone according to Is the Makeup Industry Finally Embracing Diversity?. Mainstream makeup companies now had the incentive to make products catered to brown-skinned people due to researching finding that about $7.5 billion dollars were being contributed by this ethnic base to companies such as Iman, Black Opal, and Black Radiance. Contrary to these major improvements, the beauty industry didn’t always want brown skinned people to embrace their ebony hue. In the 20th century, skin-lightening creams, which contained cancer-causing chemicals, became popular across the world where brown skinned people made up a significant part of the population or places where western influence occurred. In this case, western beauty ideology is the institution that influenced the rules of the game, which would be how makeup companies were affected by this ideology and what the consumers began to want to look like.

     In the United States, according to 7 Ways The Beauty Industry Convinced Women That They Weren’t Good Enough, beauty companies used advertisements geared African Americans to lighten their skin due the ideology that “whiter” black people were more acceptable in society compared to their more “afroid” counterparts. Across the world in Thailand, a beauty company called Seoul Secret marketed their product called Snowz with the slogan “White Makes You Win” and marketed off their consumers’ fear of being too dark by using black face in their commercial, Seoul Secret White Makes You Win Advertisement. It’s easy to say “the need to be white” has definitely gone global, but despite this current mass craze it may not be long before the need to have other features comes along since beauty ideology is known for constantly changing. In the 1920s, according to Learn How Our Standards Of Beauty Have Changed Throughout History, a more slim, boyish look was idealized for women, but later on in the 70s women were expected to have a more athletic built. There was a time when the hourglass figure was praised, yet in the 90s “heroin chic”, to be extremely skinny, started to make a trend. Beauty ideals have also changed globally as western institutions altered beauty ideology in the east such as Africa and Asia.

     During Imperialism, western European countries such as the United Kingdom, France, and Germany, along with the United States colonized and implemented their political, religious, and beauty ideology upon the natives in those regions. By forcing “white beauty” into populations that mostly consisted of brown people, they were psychological altered to believe that white was better and began to adhere to those standard. In some cases in Asia, women have gone under the knife to have Eurocentric features, such as double eyelids, according to Cultural Imperialism: Beauty from West to East. Skin lightening cream in Africa is the most popular method that many use to “become white”, many of which are known to contain cancer causing chemicals.
   
     Beauty companies have profited off of society’s oppression of the beauty of brown people through colorism, societal expectations to be “as white as possible”, and through the mass implementation of western ideology.