Researching the Aspirational Images Traditionally Set by the Korean Beauty Industry and Ways to Democratize Beauty in South Korea.
Typical Cosmetic Advertisements in South Korea
For research, interviews were conducted with two Korean advertisement companies, Innocean Worldwide and Museum Contents and Helena Go, a Senior Manager of the Global Strategic Marketing Initiatives & Transformation Department at The Estée Lauder Companies.
ll three experts in the Korean cosmetic field characterized Korean cosmetic advertisement images as follows:
- Celebrity endorsements with K-pop stars and actresses
- Top influencers are used to raise brand awareness
- Most cosmetic advertisement models not only have perfect skin but also perfect features which promotes unrealistic beauty standards
- Makeup is all done in a certain way which promotes a single beauty image
Some Examples of Typical Cosmetic Advertisements
These are three different gondolas (freestanding fixture used by retailers to display merchandise) in the lipstick section of Olive Young, the biggest health and beauty drug store in South Korea. Notice how the models in all of them have similar features, postures, and facial expressions in each of the pictures in these gondolas.
The Power of Advertisements
Advertisements are representative mass media that have the function of not only delivering information but is also a cultural tool that creates and reflects on ethics, values, and ideologies of a culture. In the lives of South Korean women, everyday media they are exposed to tend to magnify models with unrealistic appearances and their idealized life styles.
In particular, advertisements define beautiful, tall, and thin models as the ‘ideal woman’ and by portraying the era’s ideal female, they distort and fantasize beauty. Especially advertisements related to products used mostly by females consider not only the era’s social trend but also the needs of the public, and portray physical images accordingly for products. As a result, the images portrayed through advertisements are perceived as what the era has defined as ideal and shapes the aesthetic sense, values, lifestyle of the era’s women.