Beauty Culture: How It Has Impacted Women

The idea of beauty has changed and impacted women throughout history. As of recently, the beauty culture has impacted women through the industrialization of it.. This affects women through providing opportunities for them to start their own businesses, the ideal of what is considered beautiful in society,by providing women job opportunities in factories and magazine, and race, ethnicity, and skin color.

Beauty culture has impacted the lives of women throughout history. Before the industrialization, women would use home remedies to help with imperfections and with other problems they had regarding their image. Women also were not permitted to paint their face because they were seen as prostitutes. Young girls who wore makeup were not seen as pure because of the negative way makeup was portrayed as during this time. Others also viewed it as a form of witchcraft because of the way women were able to change the way they looked. Another reason was because of how men were easily seduced by the painted face of women. One example of how people viewed makeup in a negative was in “False Faces”. This shows how women would deceive men by painting their faces. 1 The view on makeup changed around 1912 due to more women wearing makeup and the industrialization of the cosmetic industry. Women were now seen as fashionable and bold for wearing makeup, and prostitutes were no longer known for their use of it.

The industrialization of the beauty culture brought both negative and positives impacts on women. One positive impact that this brought was the opportunities that women had of being able to start their own business. As a result many women wrote etiquette and beauty books. These books told women how to dress, use different home remedies to make them more beautiful, how to set up a table, and other essential rules that women had to know to become the ideal women of their time. This also encouraged women to come up with their own product through the knowledge that they had gained through home remedies being passed down from person to person. This encouraged women such as Elizabeth Arden, Helena Rubinstein, Madam C.J. Walker, and Annie Turnbo Malone to start up their own businesses. 2 Another industry that arose as a result of this was the magazine and ad industry. These magazines and advertisements were targeted towards the female audiences. They told women