Beauty Exchange

Beauty Exchange The documentary The Beauty Exchange displays the life of typical Czech women in the 21st century struggling with the image of beauty. Every person is shaped by the world around them and the basis for what a woman should look like has been instilled in society through magazines, TV, movies, advertisements, celebrities. The challenges that women are constantly facing are perfect skin, gorgeous hair, flawless make-up, good figure, fashionable style and these things have grown to be such an important part of today's society.

One would think that it was women who determined fashion trends, since they are the ones who spend so much money and effort looking good when each one comes out. Yet, this current documentary shows that is not exactly the truth. In fact, women do not play as large of a part as one may think in the process of creating and popularizing fashion trends. Often times, it is male designers who create the fashion trends, and then the media who popularizes them.

Women are often the ones struggling to change or alter their bodies in order to make them fit in with the latest trends or fashion demands. Determining who or what exactly determines current fashion and beauty trends is actually a much more complicated process. Often times, fashion trends are led by a subconscious and irrational urge, which is perpetuated by those behind the scenes in the top ranking media spots.

Often times, the fashion trends are manipulated and modeled in order to manipulate financial trends to get consumers to spend more on trying to look their best. One of the women has an assortment of products for everything you can imagine from bronzers to shampoos in order to pamper herself well. This women additionally is very obsessed with the latest fashion trends. Another women has every diet or weight-loss product possible and has tried methods from exercise to hypnotist tapes to diet pill.

One woman dislike her boobs and proceeds to get plastic surgery to fix what she sees as a problem to better her body, once she gets her first surgery she has two more follow-ups. There is a young red-haired girl who enters a modeling competition and gets signed as a model on Topmodelka who doesn't want to change who she is but we all know that comes with the industry.

Lastly there is a group of feminist women who don't use make-up to make themselves prettier rather for fun and are not obsessed with beauty and fashion trends. It is hard to choose any character to relate to in the film. Out of all of the female characters, I think I can relate to Karolina the most. Karolina is a character who has been swept away by the media's representation of beauty.

In a world where there are so many beauty advertisements and products, it is hard to understand what is actually needed. I can completely understand how one may get swept away and just end up buying products that may not be needed or ones that are too expensive for one's budget because of the media pressure to do so.

Even as a student today, I have witnessed society's pressure on anti-aging, causing many young women and men for that matter, to approach their beauty regiment like they need to ward off aging. So many products are anti-aging, but yet are geared towards relatively younger demographics. It is the media's push to convince some of these younger individuals that they need all of these anti-aging products when they really don't. There also seems to be different products for every different skin problem or idiosyncrasy possible.

Thus, instead of buying one product that is multi-dimensional, so many women today are manipulated into buying three or four, even more expensive products, that they really don't need. Karolina is the stereotypical image of the normal woman who is convinced to buy more beauty products than she needs, and for that reason I relate to her more.

I am personally not willing to do something as drastic as surgery, like Eva, but I do find myself spending more than I should on certain beauty products in order to avoid things like signs of early aging or vanishing pores. I relate to this character most because I have found myself in her position before, although not to that extreme.

It is only natural to want to believe that the next best beauty remedy holds the secret to staying younger longer and that every woman should start using it in her regiment as early as possible in order to stay young and fresh as long as possible. Clearly, the film takes a direct stand in how manipulative the media and celebrity endorsement of products can be on public opinion.

Especially in a field such as beauty, where so many women are already insecure, the media comes to exploit these insecurities to the financial advantage of major cosmetic companies and the industry as a whole. The media is responsible for all of the hype involved in the beauty industry. It perpetuates average woman's fears in a way that makes them feel ashamed of them. Obviously, there is a lot of money to made in the industry. For example, the film says that $1,927,000,000 was spent on diet products.

This is a huge industry. When a sign of weakness is found, the media really exploits it in a way that keeps its investors and sponsors in the industry paid. Celebrities just become another marketing tool that allows the media and its sponsors to tap into the minds of the every day consumer. So much attention is paid to the beauty of celebrities.

When one particularly loved celebrity endorses a product, that product can often sell like wildfire because people assume that is the reason that celebrity looks so amazing all of the time. In reality, that celebrity has a full team of full time make up artists, hair stylists, and so on, to make.