"The perfect feminine beauty"

Angelina Jolie-Vanity Fair

“With the advent of movies and television, the rules of femininity have come to be culturally transmitted more and more through standardized visual images… We are no longer given verbal descriptions or exemplars of what a lady is or of what femininity consists.”(Bordo, 1993).
This feminine ideal which feminist theorists argue is further generated and reinforced by women’s magazines through the use of such ‘models’ seems to imply that the body is never feminine enough: “that they must be deliberately and oftentimes painfully remade to be what ‘nature’ intended” (Urla & Swedlund, 1995: 240).

Gisele Bunchen- Vogue

The ideal of feminine beauty and the perfect body as promoted and reinforced by the cosmetic, weight-loss and fashion industries create in women a “dark vein of self hatred, physical obsessions, terror of aging, and dread of lost control”(Wolf, 1991) while paradoxically offering a sense of female unity through both positive and negative representation: that popularity with men comes from the achievement of the ideal and popularity with women comes from an empathy and sense of unity in achieving the ideal.

Eva Mendes- Marie Claire

Eva Mendes - Endorser for Calvin Klein

Celebrity images and women’s magazines are a key factor influencing the ideal of feminine beauty and the perfect body in relation to the formation of self. There have been several studies into the influences which magazines have upon women and the formation of gendered identity and on the importance of celebrity in modern culture. Wolf references an interview conducted with a women’s magazine reader which summarizes these relationships: the young woman describes buying such magazines “as a form of self-abuse. They give me a weird mixture of anticipation and dread" (Wolf, 1991).

Kate Moss- Elle