beauty
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The plot thickens when vitamins and beauty converge. An informed consumer might fairly wonder whether the perceptual problems mentioned above apply to beauty. It is possible that they do.
People have a thousand overlapping systems of perception around beauty and what beauty products to buy. They assess some very concrete factors, such as price. But some of the other factors are a fleeting chimera of psychology by comparison. Here are some of the ways in which vitamins and beauty overlap, sometimes involving products.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and beauty is in the eye of the beautified. The mundane questions of products and price are further complicated by the subjectivity of what all parties are trying to attain. The person on the receiving end of advice, treatments, or products has to contend with what she thinks about herself, what the beholder thinks about her, what she thinks the beholder thinks, and on into an infinite regress.
Price is like an anchor in a stormy sea. At least you know price is discrete and somewhat clinical. Of course, it is surrounded by concentric and overlapping webs of perception and psychology. And this is true for vitamins, beauty, and fragrance. If you take a respite in the price of beauty products, you won't be on that island for long. There will be vicious attacks ahead of semiotics, which is one of those branches of theory studied by the people who are trying to get you to buy certain beauty products.
Semiotics is the study of the common cultural codes that are all around us. For short, they are known as signs. To put it briefly, when a thirty-second commercial flashes in front of you for beauty products - or for vitamins, for that matter - the influence goes right to your gut. Someone on Madison Avenue has poured immense amounts of money and effort into playing off the cultural perceptions of beauty and layering up their spot with cultural codes that viewers will tend to read in certain ways.
Malcolm Gladwell's 1999 New Yorker article on Clairol and L'Oreal beauty products describes an advertising agency using the tools of psychoanalysis to research buyer motivation. "You could use the techniques of healing to figure out the secrets of selling," Gladwell writes, paraphrasing an insight from advertising legend Herta Herzog. In writing about the packaging of beauty products such as hair color, Gladwell puts a positive slant on this whole universe. He ignores its manipulative quality. He describes the hair dyes as "an immediate and affordable means of transformation," leaving out any mention of someone who notices the reasonable price and does buy, but ends up feeling empty. He frames his story in terms of empowerment for women for whom the axis of empowerment and beauty is the trite swill of hair color. The packaging up and selling of beauty products can also be ugly.