1
Betancourt
Maribel Betancourt
May 8, 2015
Professor Simmons
English 100 B
When Smoking and Beauty Connect
For many years smoking has been around us. Around the 1960s smoking was cool, it was sexy if you were a women that smoked, and you didn’t really hear about any health issues caused by smoking. In the present, we see smoking as a bad habit, a very disgusting habit if women smoke. In the past, if you heard about cigarettes it was too promote smoking. Now after finding the health risks caused by smoking we don’t promote cigarettes, we promote to stop smoking. Through out the year, smoking has switched what type of promotion they are doing, from becoming a smoker to becoming a non-smoker. They target different types of people, but in the two advertisements that I found they were both targeting women.Advertisers know how to pick at women’s insecurity. Both advertisements in two different time periods, give the same message to women: if they want to look sexy, beautiful, and slender, they need to;smoke in the 1960s and know in the present women need to stop smoking.
In my first ad, Lucky is promoting cigarettes to women. They say, “to keep a slender figure, No one can deny… Reach for a LUCKY instead of a sweet”. In the ad they place the ideal women of the time, the 1960s, a women with black curly hair, wearing makeup, leaning forward and has pucker lips like she is blowing out some smoke, we can assume she is slender because her face, arms, and shoulder doesn’t have any extra fat. So their message is if a woman wants to be sexy and beautiful they need to smoke LUCKY cigarettes because they will keep your slender body and if they aren’t slender they will become slender. It’s kind of a cheaper way to be skinny, sexy, and beautiful. It’s an easier and lazy way to become skinny. Working out or eating healthy is hard work, but smoking is easier way to be slender. You do not have to waste money on gym memberships. Compare to 40 cents a pack of cigarettes and a full gym membership; cigarettes are cheaper. The company that made the ad, they picked at the many things women are insecure about. For generations, if a woman wanted to be sexy, beautiful, and accepted byour community they had to be skinny. So the words they choose was smart move as advertisers because they are telling us if we want to be slender we need to smoke. It is morally wrong the way advertisers sell their cigarettes because they are poking at women’s insecurities and that isn’t nice because they are making girls more insecure and getting them addicted to tobacco.
This ad has many rhetorical appeals. One rhetorical appeal that the ad uses is Ethos because it appeals to emotion. The reason it appeals to emotion because they are targeting one of woman’s biggest insecurity, which is being skinny or slender as they may say. For generations, our society has preferred slender woman and that is what they use on their advertisements, a slender beautiful woman. When a woman sees the ad they get hurt if they aren’t slender and they start to believe that they don’t have to eat any kind of sweet they just need to smoke to be accepted by society because smoking will make you skinny. Which isn’t true, but that is what advertisers make us believe. If we see this message often we actually start believing it.
Two different time periods use the same methods to advertise. We may assume that after 50 years, advertisers might get a new way to advertise their product without picking on people’s insecurity, but I guess they don’t choose new methods. Even credible sources, like my next ad, that are trying to help people make better health choices are picking at insecurities.
The next advertisement is from a credible source and is a current ad. This ad comes from TUPP, Tobacco Use Prevention Program, which is from Orange County, California. This ad is opposite from the first ad. This ad is probably in clinics, hospitals, and doctors offices because it promotes becoming a non-smoker. This ad promotes quitting smoking, if you like to look beautiful. This ad is very effective because it has a picture of half a beautiful women, who is the ideal American women and the other half is of a women who smokes. She’s the ideal woman because she has a slim face, a perfect beach tan, with white straight teeth, the natural flawless make-up and skin. She has a nice cheekbone and clear nails. In the other half of her face, the one that represents a smoking girl, it’s the total opposite. She doesn’t look like the ideal American women. Her nails are yellow; her teeth aren’t nice they are not straight, but they are yellow. Her lips are cracked and black and don’t look hydrated. Her skin looks ashy and black, with wrinkles and she has bags under her eyes like if she hasn’t slept. Her beauty has left her because of smoking. It’s a very powerful image because it shows both sides of a non-smoker and a smoker. It also says, “A cheaper way of looking smoking hot…quit”.
The reason it is cheaper to look beautiful without smoking is because you won’t have to pay to get plastic surgery with all the defects that smoking causes.You won’t have to cover up all the bad things smoking causes, but sometimes you can’t cover it without paying a lot of money. For example, when your teeth turn all nasty or yellow and to fix that you have to pay a lot of money to the dentist for whitening and maybe a new set of fake teeth. This ad has the same message as the first one, “if you want to be beautiful, than quit smoking”. This uses the rhetorical appeal of Ethos and Pathos.
It uses Ethos because it has a credible source and if the people from Orange County see the ad they would know that it is credible because it has the county’s logo on the bottom right. They also use the appeal to emotion and logic. The appeal to logic is simple because you can put two and two together, that if you don’t smoke, the affects of smoke won’t happen to you. The appeal to emotion is the same as the first ad, but this ad doesn’t want you to smoke. If you want to be sexy and beautiful then you need to stop smoking. The appeal to emotion is the advertisement playing in the need of women wanting to be the ideal American girl because society has put it in our heads that the only way we are considered beautiful is if we look like the non-smoking girl in the ad.
The easiest audiences to capture are women. The reason women are easy to capture as audience is all thanks to society. Society has created the ideal American girl that women have to become. If you don’t look like the ideal American girl naturally, maybe surgery will help. Advertisers just tell us that the product will help us look younger or will give us a small chance to look a lit bit more like the ideal American girl and as women we fall into the trap. Women aren’t to blame to falling into this trap; society is the blame because they have been drilling this into women for centuries. The two ads are around 50 years apart and they still convey the same message. The two advertisements promote two different things, smoking and non-smoking, but still using the same message. Society hasn’t changed with making women believe they have to look like the ideal American girl. The “ideal” American girl has changed over the years, from being to thick, to curvy, and our stage of being a beach girl. A beach girl is a slender woman, with a beach tan, flawless natural makeup, straight white teeth, and smooth skin.
It also uses Pathos in advertising because it gives fear to woman. It persuades a woman not to smoke because of the fear to lose the natural beauty.The advertisement uses that fear woman have of not being accepted by society because women feel that they don’t measure up to the ideal American girl. Advertisers play with our fear. Majority of the woman fall into the stereotype that we are obsessed with looking perfect or at least good, but the reason we fall into this stereotype is because society puts woman in that position. We were made to believe that everything that society has told us to do was true, but it really isn’t because they aren’t always right.
Logos is used because we see facts in the advertisement. Some facts about smoking are that your teeth and nails turn yellow and your health isn’t the same. I think the reason half of the face is turning black is because it can represent getting black lungs, since that happens when someone smokes a lot. Black skin represents the damage smoking causes on your skin. These visual facts help support the fear, Pathos, that society has pushed on women; the fear that if they do not look like the “ideal” American girl that we are not going to be accepted in society.
These two ads give us the same message, but they are giving different products that relate each other. In the first ad they were promoting smoking and giving you a pass into society. In the second ad they are promoting to quit smoking and a pass into society. This is what society accepts. In the two different ads shows how far we have learned. Learning the dangers of smoking, we have stop promoting cigarettes to promoting non-smoking, but we still give the same message to women; that they need to look slender, sexy, and beautiful and the only way for them to accomplish that is to do what the advertiser tells them too.Even though we have gone far we are still stuck on stereotypes to help advertise things, women get sucked back in with trying to become the ideal American girl.