Visual Lit Final - Subverting Beauty: BodyPositive

And THEN I realized, "Wait, I spent like a week straight in Photoshop for several hours a day manipulating advertisements! I should post those, too."

Anyway. :3

This is one of the image manips I did for my Visual Literacy final. We had the choice of writing a 6-8 page paper or making a visual argument that was the equivalent of 6-8 pages. I chose to make a magazine of sorts aimed at taking what the media portrays as ideal and challenging it. I chose to focus on six different types of beauty: Cultural, body-positive, older, androgynous, unique, and natural. I took ads out of the May 2014 Cosmopolitan magazine, scanned them in, and got to work in Photoshop.

This is one of my favorites. Slim Fast ads are interesting. For one thing, they're own by Unilever, who also owns Dove and Axe. There are a LOT of conflicting messages between the brands. Dove is trying to push this "You're fine the way you are" thing, Slim Fast says "You really ought to try to lose weight", and Axe shoves the most "idealized" version of women at us and basically puts it out there that those are the women who are actually attractive. For this particular ad, I hated that the women weren't women at all, but mannequins with no heads/personality, and the notion that if you're a little heavier, you should be/will be ashamed of your body enough that you need to cover it up. It's not realistic, and it shouldn't be. I aimed to show larger women who are very happy with who they are. The bride originally wasn't there, but I saw ANOTHER Slim Fast ad aimed at brides-to-be that had cake toppers with the groom struggling to carry his bride and ultimately dropping her through the cake. I absolutely hated that, so I stuck a plus-size bride in.

Original ads are of course NOT mine and were only altered for educational purposes!