As a media genre, advertising offers a unique opportunity to study how the beauty ideal is constructed across cultures. This research analyzes the content of advertisements from women's fashion and beauty magazines in Singapore, Taiwan, and the U.S. to compare how beauty is encoded and found a noticeable difference between the portrayals of women from the U.S. and from the two East Asian societies in terms of sexual portrayal. In addition, Asian ads contained a large proportion of cosmetics and facial beauty products whereas the U.S. ads were dominated by clothing. These findings suggest that beauty in the U.S. may be constructed more in terms of "the body," whereas in Singapore and Taiwan the defining factor is more related to a pretty face. The article also discusses how feminist critiques of the sexual objectification of women in advertising may need to be considered within their historical, Western context of origin.Each culture has a set of general beliefs about what constitutes femininity and beauty. According to Wood (1999), to be feminine in the United States is to be attractive, deferential, unaggressive, emotional, nurturing, and concerned with people and relationships. According to Hofstede (1997), in Confucian cultures, femininity is associated with virtue and modesty. The script for femininity is written into a culture and is transmitted over time through family, peers, teachers, and the media.Likewise, beauty is a construct that varies from culture to culture and changes over time. A buxom Marilyn Monroe was the beauty ideal in the United States in the 1950s, soon to be replaced by the emaciated Twiggy of the 1960s. Whereas porcelain skin is valued in China, scarification of the skin is a beauty process in parts of Africa. Thus, the particular set of physical characteristics perceived as The Construction of Beauty 57 beautiful and desirable can vary across cultures and time periods. Advertisements offer us a unique opportunity to study the construction of beauty in a culture because advertisers are notorious for promoting a "beauty ideal" (Greer, 1999) or, as Cortese (1999) pointed out, presenting "the exemplary female prototype." Because the majority of research on images of women in advertising over the past 30 years has been conducted in the U.S. and Europe (literature may reflect assumptions about women that are specific to Western cultures. Certain themes have dominated this literature, such as the stereotyping of women as passive and less powerful players in society, the portrayal of women as sexual objects in ads, and the cumulative effect of magazine advertising on women's self-esteem.The purpose of this research is to compare the portrayals of beauty in women's fashion and beauty magazine advertisements from Asia and the U.S. to help understand how beauty is constructed across cultures.
