Touch Me, Hold Me, Love Me, 2002

“Unavoidably, from her earliest years, beauty will be either attributed or denied to her.  If she does not have it, she may hope to gain it; if she possesses it, she will certainly lose it.  But what exactly is ‘beauty.” (Francette, P., ‘The Symptom of Beauty,’ 1994, p.14).

Advertisements don’t just sell products; they sell ideals of beauty and desire. As Calvin Klein states, “Desire is about what you want, not what you need”.

They are everywhere you look: magazines, billboards, television and cinema. They aim to entice, seduce, and appeal.  Men and women everywhere are bombarded with them daily.  They offer us a kind of artificial perfection designed to tempt our unconscious desires, stimulating those primal urges that are repressed in the everyday confines of civilisation.  They are, of course, advertisements.