It’s not that I don’t want moisturized “lips for a full 8 hours” (I’d vote yes for ‘soft, un-chapped lips’ if they were running for office), I just can’t support any product that implies that a woman should have lips (or anything else) like a baby.
A woman should have lips (and everything else) like a woman.
Baby Lips with its childish packaging and annoying name has bothered me for a while.
After seeing the Baby Lip still ad for the 100th time online recently, I could be silent no more.
This soapbox has an attached ladder, and I am climbing it to the top.
A pouty-mouthed model with dead eyes is used in the advertisements for the balm. She’s beautiful and I am sure she is a swell gal, but what her mouth represents makes me frown like the one clown who couldn’t fit in the clown car.
Am I the only one that finds the whole thing gross?
Her Bratz doll like-lips are crying out for a pacifier.
"Burp me," they say. "I am helpless."
Apparently, she has the lips that we should all want: fuller on the top and smaller on the bottom.
After seeing the ad recently, a male friend went 'ga ga' over the model's lips, and I am not taking "goo goo ga ga."
Babies are great, but neither babies nor little girls should be considered hot.
Little girls should be seen as little girls and not sex objects women should try to emulate.
Harsh words about a lip balm, I know, but this issue goes to the image of women in the media.
They say the product is an enemy to dry lips, but with this ad, Maybelline is clearly implying that women should strive to look like little helpless tots.
If ‘soft as a baby’ is what they wanted to imply, they would have called the product baby butts.
A tag line like “get lips as soft as a baby backside,” probably wouldn’t sell many tubes of lip balm.
To answer my earlier question, I am not the only one troubled by the product.
Lisa Wade, an Los Angeles-based cultural critic and sociologist, took on Maybeline in a Ms. magazine blog post called “Baby Lips: Thanks for the Infantilization, Maybelline.”
She quotes writer Susan Sontag’s essay, “The Double Standard of Aging” in the Dec. 21, 2011 post:
“The great advantage men have is that our culture allows two standards of male beauty: the boy and the man… A man does not grieve when he loses the smooth, unlined, hairless skin of a boy. For he has only exchanged one form of attractiveness for another …
“There is no equivalent of this second standard for women. The single standard of beauty for women dictates that they must go on having clear skin. Every wrinkle, every line, every gray hair, is a defeat.”
This is my opinion, but what do you think?
Contact this columnist at arobinson@DaytonDailyNews.com or Twitter.com/DDNSmartMouth
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