A Shanghai beauty salon’s attempt to promote its hair removal treatments has backfired on mainland social media after likening women who do not remove their body hair to orangutans.
Posters showing an orangutan juxtaposed against several models in before and after pictures from a hair-removal specialist salon called Strip, which is originally from Singapore, caused outrage after photos appeared online earlier this month, Xinhao Caijing reported.
The images of the advertisement went viral on mainland Chinese social media, receiving 4 million views on Douyin alone.
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“I’ve made a tipoff against this advertisement,” one person commented. “This company degrades women and materialises women and creates body anxiety among women only for the sake of its commercial interests.”
“What’s wrong with being hairy?” a second person asked.
Another said: “A store serving women brought discomfort to women. Is it aware of who its customers are?”
An employee from Strip’s Shanghai salon said the company’s head office supplied the ad posters and that an orangutan was used because they had difficulty finding a woman with ample body hair to appear in the advertisement.
“The orangutan represents a person with too much body hair,” the unnamed employee said. “The advertisement sends the message that if you don’t remove your body hair, you will look like an orangutan; if you remove it, you will become beautiful.”
Strip later confirmed that the posters had been “adjusted”, and promised they would carefully vet future ad campaigns.
However, the damage caused by the ad campaign may linger for some time after the China Women’s Newspaper, the mouthpiece of the All-China Women’s Federation, criticised the ads in an editorial last week.
“It’s not only related to gender. If a company’s marketing strategy does not show the basic respect [for customers], how can customers trust this company?”
Yang Xueyan, a gender researcher from Xi’an Jiaotong University, told the South China Morning Post that the hair-removal advertisement had made her “very uncomfortable”.
“Even if they had found a person with body hair to use in the advertisement, it is still a serious humiliation for women. Do you judge that a woman who is fat is ugly? Do you judge that a hairy woman is ugly?” Yang said.
“Many advertisements or marketing campaigns have breached the bottom line on women in recent years, thanks to ad makers’ outdated gender mindsets, unaware that their perception of women is wrong.”
Feng Yuan, co-founder of Equality Beijing, a women’s rights and gender equality NGO, had a similar reaction she described as, “extreme discomfort and anger”.
“It is in line with male-centred aesthetic appreciation. That beauty standard measures women’s value and even decides if a woman can be a human being [as this advertisement shows],” Feng told the Post.
“Until this mindset is eliminated, similar ads will re-emerge in other forms,” she said. “Therefore, it’s urgent to popularise gender equality awareness.”
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