Week 9 - Race and Beauty

So-Hyeon (Diana) Park
ASA 141
Week 9

This upcoming week's reading was about how women models are portrayed differently depending on their ethnicity and products they are advertising for. Katherine Frith, Hong Cheng, and Ping Shaw analyzed that cultures and beauty standards have a huge impact on advertisers' selection between Asian and Western models; they hypothesized that Asian models would avoid direct eye contact with the camera, advertise for different products, and be in modest, less seductive clothes. They conducted their study with the help of two graduate students in Singapore and examined 220 advertisements.

The results of the study suggest that Western models are more frequently used in both Asian and Western magazines, Western models are used in more seductive settings, and both Western and Asian models look directly at the camera. An interesting finding is that Western models advertise for body-related products while Asians are for face-related ones. They also mention how Western and Asian perceptions of their beauty focuses differ, and they related this distinction to their study.



There are a few points I am wondering about. Can we trust this study and its finding whose results are based on two graduate students' analyses? Would the results be different if they were more people involved in analyzing the advertisements? Also, the authors were not clear about how they divided the models' ethnicity. Races are not a dichotomous matter. Rather, they are getting more complicated as more people travel around the world and settle in different locations. If there were models whose parents are Asians and Westerners, how did the scholars categorize these models? These are some points we need to consider as they are crucial when determining their findings.