You will see no nose impressed no thick face

Stop the clones! "headline without a State of soul"Le Nouvel Observateur"in mid-January, denouncing the surging"inflatable lips, swollen cheeks and silicone breasts ". As in the 1970s under pressure, feminists, or in the 1990s with the lifting of the taboo on anorexia advertising is again charged to impose a model of female beauty univocal and alienating.

A model based on three major criteria: "youth, thinness and Western origin, lists the philosopher and sociologist Gilles Lipovetsky.". Much of the blacks success of models like Naomi Campbell, but the revolution is fine: it's beauty, Caucasian features. You will see no nose impressed, no thick face. While, paradoxically, "thick", held traditionally ugly in our societies, is back in the West with the injection in the lips and the silicone breasts.

A model, especially, all the more difficult to reach than the Visual advertising, cleverly redrafted via software such as Photoshop, impose on women an impossible ideal: high cheekbones, fleshy lips, a voluptuous chest and one size of WaSP, associated with the long legs of filly and "baby face" top-models of 15 years. An example of these excesses: in the last campaign Dior anti-aging, actress Sharon Stone, fifty-two years, is barely recognizable.

Increasing pressure

"Advertising has a responsibility in this increasing pressure, but it does not, alone, aesthetic standards, judge the psychoanalyst Serge Hefez, specialist among other anorexia." On the other hand, it reflects well enough a society more and more individualistic, where self-esteem is related to the ongoing work that one book to be accomplished, to exceed. Before, it was defined from its social memberships... At present, self-esteem depends on what is managed to make her life, mentally, socially, relationally, lovingly. The noose is tightening.

Gilles Lipovetsky is even more brutal: "women are subjected continuously to double discourse." On the one hand, the media and advertising ordered them: "be yourself", i.e. asking an individuality, a singularity. On the other, they firmly them to conform to a model extremely strict and imperative, short, to be in a permanent control of themselves. Beauty became canonical, indisputable, and the models are internalized within the framework of what is now a true global terrorism, a dictatorship from 7 to 77 years. Rather than liberalism, the omnipotence of the single thought is on the standards of beauty.

And women lost: strange masochistic caste, they applauded the Dove campaign with both hands (Unilever), Ogilvy, who in 2003 had signed the notch present girls natural, spontaneous and imperfect... but they continue parallel to bulk buy L'Oreal products, promoted by marmoréennes and inaccessible icons. While marginally, Dove returned to more conventional campaigns. That is to say: in the Kingdom of beauty, schizophrenia is Queen.

A little more visible minorities

Despairing Not quite: locks jump, taboos collapsed. But not steps. In the years 1980 and 1990, highlighting the Director in advertising of the black beauty (Grace Jones) or Maghreb (Farida, first dummy beur), artistic Jean-Paul Goude was provocative. Today, a tremor is felt: "Between 2005 and 2008, diversity rate rose from 3 to 7 in advertising campaigns," welcomes Jean-Pierre Teyssier, Chairman of the PFAR (Association of professional regulation of advertising), which includes advertising, advertisers and media. Even if it notes that "the rate of diversity is much more important in television and campaigns include groups of individuals in the magazine press, where advertisers are hesitant when it comes to stage a single person promoting a consumer product." "The fact, then, be it black or Asian makes the identification of the much more difficult consumer."

Same advanced mixed blessing for senior citizens. A decade ago, RSCG agency BETC attempted to repeat the success of its "baby swimmers" spot Evian with a skewer of seniors radiant. Bouderie of the consumer. Ten years later, actresses Jane Fonda (73 years) and Andie McDowell (nearly 52 years) boast of l ' Oréal anti-aging creams. It is true that they are still beautiful, sometimes even have a name, a legend. A door is open, but the time is certainly not come where an anonymous quinquagénaire will be sought...

Clients are less fooled

Mostly, the eyes of the consumer is more piercing, more acute: having itself of a digital camera, it now identifies the FX. Retrieves the sham. And, when the advertiser is taken hand in the bag, the case of the fuss. L ' Oréal still bites the fingers have added, in his campaign of British pub, for lashes to his muse Penelope Cruz to boast a mascara "super-lengthening". The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) illico requested the withdrawal of the offending Visual. "Things done, but it is slow," recognizes Jean-Pierre Teyssier, who resumed the questioning Lord: "is this the role of the pub to advance society." This, advertisers meet us regularly: "This is not our job." And it is true that the advertising is rather to reflect the society to the advance. Therefore, ensure that campaigns are evolving at an equivalent rate. Neither too slow nor too fast. As Lenin said: "It may be a step before the masses but not both."