Slogtember 22 - Self

Advertisements are so provocative. Unconsciously, they change they way people see the world, the way people think and in the end they always win the mind-battle. They can also affect the society in every single way possible.

I’m home right now. Since I don’t have much to do, I watch TV majority of the time for the past 2 days. I can’t help but to look at the TV ads too (and there are loadssss of them).

As a teenager, there are certain types of ads that catch my attention. One is beauty stuff and another is ad of products targeted to teenage girls or women. And I have some examples too.

One of the ads that I hate the most is the whitening beauty product ads. I hate how the ads is trying so hard to set people’s mind to think that beauty is white skin. They seriously have to stop this. I mean this is Indonesia. If you’re not half something else or you’re the majority of Indonesian, you will have brown skin. That’s just the way it is. It is genetic and it’s going to happen, you’re going to have it. 

So, why do the advertisements trying so hard to sell “white skin”? It bugs me that they’re trying so often to tell people that white skin is the thing and brown skin is so last year? Is it because brown skin is so mainstream? I mean look at foreigners trying so hard to tan their skin to make it looks brown. They even have a machine that exposes their skin directly to the UV even though it is super dangerous. And here we are, thinking that white skin is the “thing” and trying so hard to make our skin looks so white and deleting our identity (kind of).

The same thing goes to the slimming products. There are so many advertisements about slimming products from milk, supplement, medicine and so on. They’re trying to make people think that beauty is slim, or to the extreme end, skinny.  Not trying to be hypocrite, I don’t always feel happy about the way I look. But whenever I think about it, at the same time I realize there are only very few girls who have the skinny figures. That’s not me. And that’s not how most girls’ bodies are. So many people strive to be skinny and hating themselves from young age. That’s NOT healthy both physically and mentally. There are so many beautiful people and talented people who are not skinny and they are successful and in the end the society thinks that they are pretty. And yes, I agree it’s not easy to not to feel self-conscious when the media is pestering us with the image of this perfect skinny white-skinned girl. But you’ve got to try to rise above the stereotypes.

The people around you also contribute on how you think, consciously and unconsciously. I have been in that situation. I’ve never had friends who talks about make up or fashion or anything related to beauty at home. My friends are guys or girls who behave like guys. When I moved away, girls are girls. They talk about fashion, beauty, make up, and clothes (amongst other things too you know, not saying this is a negative thing). More than just talking about it, they actually do something about it. For the first time ever I have people around me feeling self-conscious about their eyebrows and do stuffs like plucking, waxing or threading. Meanwhile, I’m here standing not knowing which kind of eyebrow is ugly and which one is good. Shame on me, right?

On the bottom line, I’m not saying if you’re skinny, white-skinned or if you care about how you look like is wrong. I don’t think that way. It is very good to take care and look after your self. But please do not hate yourself if you are not the same as those girls on TV or magazine. Just make sure that you are healthy and happy. Love yourself the way you are because if you are doing things the right way, you’ll hopefully feel beautiful. I’m trying to and I’m sure lots of other girls are doing the same thing too J