Advertisements are everywhere. From the moment you hit snooze on your alarm clock, to the time when you lay your head back down on your pillow you have have probably seen close to 3,000 advertisements--in one day! More specifically, these advertisements try to cling to the human psyche in a way that is called "classic conditioning". Classic conditioning in advertising aims to target people buy pairing products with desirable or pleasurable objects, such as fame, fortune, beauty, or sex. These connections, though far-fetched, claim that if you buy the product, your life will be one less notch away from "perfection-status".
Women are greatly affected by this wave of beauty advertising, as shown in the photo above. The advertisement is selling mascara, but not just any old model is posing for the ad--it is endorsed by actress, Julia Roberts. Women are then left saying, "if Julia Roberts uses this mascara then it must be amazing! If I use it, then surely my eyelashes will look as full and sultry as hers!" And that, is where we are pulled in. Pulled in by the luxe fame of a celebrity, who endorses the product, when in full reality the celebrity themselves forgo major photo-shopping before the ad is put to print, as the video below depicts. Advertisers are pulling at precisely the right strings; as classical conditioning points out, if a product is associated with a pleasurable object then our chances of associating the product as being pleasurable raises ten-fold.
So in the end, we should ask ourselves: All gimmicks, packaging, and celeb endorsements aside, is this product necessary or even desirable to me?
Chances are, it's not.
As a woman, yes, it's totally true...the majority of us strive for perfection. Working with photography, I also know that photoshop is the secret (even though magazine ads make cosmetics REALLY tempting). Even with this knowledge, it's funny how I still end up buying a lot of these products. The mind is an interesting thing...