INDUSTRY EXPERIENCE HND BEAUTY THERAPY

Industry Experience HND Beauty Therapy



Industry Experience HND Beauty Therapy

Introduction

Considerable evidence has accumulated that, regardless of cultural change in its meaning, beauty is an effective selling. Beautiful people like Christie Brinkley, Cindy Crawford, and Cheryl Tiegs, famous girls on the cover of which looks to go "millions of dollars in advertising and marketing costs of companies for clothes and cosmetics" (Foltz, 1992, p. 4F). Advertisers pay on communications between £ 1 and £ 2 million a year to promote their products popular and glamorous women, their beauty is believed to add noise to the products.

Being physically attractive, however, does not seem enough - it seems a necessary but not sufficient condition. For example, Pepsi had to scrap its ultra-expensive endorsement deal with Madonna after she came out with a controversial video, which has not gone very well with the Catholic Church and many other viewers (Miller, 1991, p. 2). It was not her attractiveness that was an issue. Then there was that “little faux pas of Cybil Shepherd, who announced that she did not eat meat, yet she was a pitchwoman for the beef industry” (Miller, 1991, p. 2). Again, attractiveness was not the issue. Both blunders suggest that there is more to “beauty” than a simple “good/bad judgment of attractiveness” (Solomon, et al., 1992, p. 23) - “beauty” would seem to be more than skin deep.

It is remarkable therefore, that, despite the recognition that “being beautiful isn't enough” and that “stars have to have something special and almost indefinable” (Foltz, 1992, p. 4F), attractiveness has been most frequently defined as, and/or assumed to be, physical attractiveness. Attractiveness studies concentrate on “physical attractiveness” (e.g. a small sample includes Baker and Churchill, 1977; Belch, et al., 1987; Bloch and Richins, 1992; Caballero and Pride, 1984; Dion et al., 1972; Kahle and Homer, 1985; Kamins, 1990; Ohanian, 1990; Patzer, 1985; Solomon et al., 1992). Even when multiple items are used to measure perceived attractiveness, (e.g. as in Ohanian's (1990) scale of source credibility), the items tend to be physically-based adjectives such as attractive, classy, beautiful, elegant, sexy, etc.

Furthermore, Ohanian's (1990) subscale is unusual because it does use multiple items. “Beauty” has been more typically defined as “attractiveness” in advertising literature and research, and has been measured, almost invariably, on a single “attractive/ unattractive” dimension. For example, Kamins (1990) identified unattractive and attractive celebrity spokespeople (Telly Savalas and Tom Selleck) by asking respondents to evaluate 20 male celebrities on “a seven-point scale ranging from 'extremely physically attractive' to 'extremely physically unattractive'” (p. 7).

Recently, Solomon et al. (1992) have argued that “beauty is a psychological multiplicity ... replete with nuance” (p. 24). Using multidimensional scaling to analyse sorting data, their study revealed “six distinct types of good looks” (i.e. six categories of physical attractiveness). The study most assuredly pushes attractiveness research in the direction of recognising that beauty is not a unidimensional construct. It does not, however, push it far enough because it investigates multiple types of physical beauty ...