Beautification of Self-Identity

What I found interesting in the Gill chapter on magazines is the significance of the teen market to magazines. Because magazines cultivate a certain identity for a certain group of people, teenagers, specifically girls, become the target for products that relate to beautification in creating the female teen identity today. Over the years there has been and increase in girls concern for how they look. Magazines, like the conduct books of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, have become an avenue, which dictate appropriate behaviors and acceptable appearance for teenage girls through purchase power.

This ability to buy beautification increases significantly during this time of a person’s life as the period of adolescence is linked to the identity vs. role confusion stage of development. During this time teenagers are concerned with determining and establishing their identities and magazines contribute to this by suggesting to the consumer how they could be and look if they adhere to what the magazine is saying and promoting. With the focus on exploring identity comes the willingness to try different things out making teenage girls likely to consume products, furthering their identity search, aiding teenage girls in formulating a concept of what it means to be feminine. Teenage girls become easy targets for the beautification products as they generally have freedom because of their age and lack of responsibilities in life and because of the link to their parents who endow them with the power to purchase. Magazines like Cosmo Girl, Seventeen, Teen Vogue fill the minds of teenage girls with the suggestions of how to be a woman; magazines have become n influential factor contributing to the American culture as it relates to the teenage population.