T.J. Walker on Helen Mirren becoming L'Oréal's face at 69. The deal makes business sense for hair color products, but real cultural change depends on media exposure and parenting, not just one spokesperson.
Actress Helen mirren at age 69 is the new face of L'. Oreal. Many folks have long criticized the beauty industry for perpetuating the myth that you have to be young, really young, like 17 in order to be beautiful. And the use of models from age 11 to 19, some almost exclusively. Now L' Oreal is using as one of its top faces in its advertising campaign Helen Mirren, the well known actress who is just months shy of 70. What are we to make of this? Well, for starters, l' Oreal knows that people like me and other commentators are going to be talking about it. So it's generating some buzz, some favorable buzz. I think it does reflect their marketplace. If you are selling hair color, probably not that many 17 year olds have gray hair yet. So it does make perfect sense. And it also makes sense to just have variety in spokespersons and people who are the public brand of your company. Beyond that, I'm not sure it really means that much. Most of us, if we are buying clothes, things to put on us, makeup, it's because we want to look better than we are. We want to look better than reality. We're not looking to mirror reality. And that's why you don't see men or women walking down the catwalk in fashion shows that resemble people in real life. Now you could certainly make the case that the standards are far different for women. A 5 foot or 6 foot, 109 pound woman is statistically way off the charts compared to the average woman who's, you know, 53140145 compared to the average male model who's only a couple of inches taller than the average man and without the big beer belly. But I do think that when it comes to who fashion companies, beauty companies use as spokespeople, they that the larger focus is not on them creating unreal expectations, but on how parents and the rest of us let our children absorb culture. If you let your child watch nothing but television and don't give them good books to read and you yourself are only watching TMZ and tabloid trash, then that's what they're going to pick up on and that's where they're going to get their images of self worth. If you're focusing your efforts on things of substance, people of substance, ideas of substance, maybe it won't really matter who the spokesperson is. For any fashion or beauty company. I'm T.J. walker.
You're Not Being Judged on Your Work Yet: What New Hires Are Really Evaluated On
