Topic > A Criticism of the Loves Baby Soft Perfume Advertisement

In 1975, Love's Baby Soft ran a controversial advertisement for a cosmetic perfume that featured a headshot of a young girl of about eight to ten years old with a white teddy bear. Her hair is shoulder-length brown with loose, soft curls parted on one side. Her right shoulder reveals a white shoulder pad with ruffles from the dress she is wearing; while to his left there is a white furry bear. She has piercing seductive blue eyes with bright red lipstick similar to that of teddy bears. Her lips are slightly parted, which makes them look like she's powdering herself. Full makeup with brown mascara, brown eyeshadow on her porcelain white skin looks fake and plastic like a doll's. Her hand, which is the size of an adult woman's, is slightly bent at the wrist above the white bear in classic Barbie doll style, with two middle fingers together while the index and little fingers are separated. The overall tone of the image is pink and blurry. In the bottom left corner is an image of four long, phallic-shaped bottles of the company's product with a caption that reads: Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay “Love's Baby Soft is that irresistible smell of a clean baby, grown up enough to be sexy. It smells delicate. Pure and innocent. It might be the sexiest fragrance around.” Over her head is a passage that also says: “Love's Baby Soft”. ​​Because innocence is sexier than you think "Which at first glance appears to be a sweet and innocent advertisement. Looking deeper, he is far from innocent. The mental image, as one might imagine, is in a sexual and seductive mannerism. This ad is designed to draw women's attention by praying on women's insecurities in terms of attention, appearance, age, gender; they are all very sensitive desires that women struggle with and try to maintain on a daily basis in the hope of attracting the opposite sex. Society's expectations of women's appearance have truly gone too far. The female gender has always wanted to appear older when she is "too" young and younger when she is "too" old. It is because of advertisements like this that children are seen as sexual candidates by sick pedophiles. Advertising companies rely on these types of insecurities to convince consumers to buy their product. Meanwhile, subtle or otherwise subliminal symbolic messages are portrayed with complete contempt for older women and at the same time eroticize this child in a sexual pornographic way as a marketing strategy. As mentioned above, Love's Baby Soft is a company that sells cosmetic fragrances and has for over four decades. Using these types of marketing techniques to attract any audience is useless and absurd, yet somehow they have been overlooked. Sex and a baby should never have been in the same thought let alone in the same advertisement. In Fowles' essay, he divides these advertising techniques into fifteen categories. This particular ad has about five of them: The need for sex. The need for education. The need for dominance. The need for attention. The need for aesthetic sensation. Most ads contain both illustrations and text like this. Advertising researchers donate large sums to test consumer responses to different colors, shapes and layouts. Especially in recent decades, advertisements have often been composed with meticulous attention to detail and extensive pre-testing, so that even the smallest aspect of an advertisement can.