It is often said that “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder”, but is there any real truth to that? The phrase itself merely means that beauty has no set characterization, depiction, or even value for that matter. In a beauty salon, hairdressers use the environment of the salon and their clear connection to the beauty culture to accommodate to each individual clients interpretation of beauty. I think this was best stated when Lennon remarked that, “In the beauty parlors, women not only accommodate to or go along with media-defined beauty, they also actively create beauty culture on their own terms to fulfill the needs of the women hope to achieve it” (pg. 295).The hairdressers at the beauty salon, lay a foundation that bridges the gap between those who strive for beauty and those who outline what beauty is; they become the path to those criterions while tending to the transformation on the outside as well as the inside without passing judgments. I would like to start off first and foremost with the fact that women have always been recognized to devote a large portion of their time to beauty. Those women who are dedicated to portraying a certain image of themselves most frequently believe that with beauty everything else will come along such as success and being well liked by other. Women are completely and totally mesmerized by this notion presented by the media due to the overwhelming amount of bombardment of media messages that women are faced with on a daily basis in magazines and television advertisements with images of unrealistically attractive and powerful women, the complete package. Ridgeway reiterates this statement when she says, “These more contemporary films that follow this tradition as well, marking the beauty parlor as a place in which women get their hair done and let their hair down, a setting in which female knowledge, assumed unique and often essential, becomes privileged”
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