Imagine you're a teenage girl (maybe you are). You're probably fairly average looking: some nice features and a couple things you wish you could improve. Then you pick up a fashion magazine and start flipping through. The pages are full of perfect women in perfect clothes smiling perfect smiles. Of course you compare yourself to them. "She's clearly beautiful, am I?" Invariably you fall short. Even your good features start to look homely. You begin to think of yourself as ugly. In an attempt to cover it, to reach that point of "beautiful", you buy the makeup, the clothes, the jewelry that the magazines are advertising.

That's exactly what the ad writers intended. They're happy, and make lots of money. The girl buying the whatever-it-is becomes instantly beautiful and lives happily ever after. Right? (That was sarcasm for those out there who can't hear my tone of voice.)

What so many girls don't realize is how much the models are altered with makeup & lighting and how many hundreds of shots were necessary to capture that one instant of carefree, unselfconscious loveliness. In normal life, the models look like normal people. And one the pictures are taken, they can be doctored: legs stretched, blemishes erased, eyes made to glow, butts slimmed, hair defuzzed and shined, etc....

Pictures tell the story better than words.

I've noticed this philosophy of "make her feel ugly and present a miracle solution" elsewhere. Jill & I were wandering through a department store and came across a skin analysis station in the cosmetics department. Sure, we were bored, why not? Jill went first. Jill has perfect skin. Absolutely perfect. The lady running the stations was clearly disappointed. But I've never had a good complexion and when I swapped places with Jill the cosmetics lady's eyes lit up. She described all my blemishes in delighted detail, carefully choosing words and phrases to make me feel as grotesque and homely as possible. Then, when she thought she'd demoralized me enough, she handed me over to the main cosmetics counter where another expert manipulator started telling me how this base or that eyeliner would make me look SO good. Talk about good cop, bad cop!!

Unfortunately for them, I have a pretty high resistance to brainwashing, but the experience was very thought provoking. The more I watch advertising the more I see that pattern: cut them down and offer a solution - for a price of course. [an error occurred while processing this directive]