‘The Male Feminist’ Ep 8: Shweta Tripathi Calls Beauty Standards A Marketing Gimmick To Sell Products. Where’s The Lie?
Someone finally said it!
We’ve all grown up watching advertisements promoting beauty standards in a bid to sell us products and that did take a toll on all of us in some way or the other. As a dusky Punjabi kid, I would always ask my parents to buy me fairness creams so I could be fair like my cousins. More than my family, those advertisements got to me and pushed me to believe in societal beauty standards. In the latest episode of Hauterrfly’s The Male Feminist, actress Shweta Tripathi spoke to the host, Siddhaarth Alambayan about playing the role of Enakshi Dasgupta, in Gone Kesh, a teenager diagnosed with Alopecia. She also spoke about how beauty standards make us believe that our hair makes us beautiful. Further, the actress called beauty standards a marketing gimmick aimed at getting us to buy products.
In episode 8 of The Male Feminist, Shweta Tripathi opened up about playing a character struggling to come to terms with having a condition that leads to hair fall and even balding. When asked how she dealt with playing a role like that, Shweta Tripathi said, “Hair is very important even for men. Marketing has shown us dark black, voluminous hair as beautiful and I like to challenge such beauty standards because I believe it’s nothing more than a marketing gimmick. Obviously, they want their products to sell. And we’re also conditioned into believing that things like long hair and tall height are beautiful. I never understood how not having hair made someone less beautiful. And the kind of messages I got from people after doing Gone Kesh was the most fulfilling thing ever, more any award or any review,” said Shweta Tripathi.
Also Read: ‘The Male Feminist’ Ep 8: Here’s What Shweta Tripathi Believes Marriage Should Look Like. She’s Got A Point!
She makes so much sense right? I mean, advertisements enforced beauty standards on all of us more than anything else. But there’s more. Shweta Tripathi also spoke about getting married in her 30s and the kind of societal pressures she had to face as well as the importance of having a sense of self in one’s marriage among other things. Watch the full video.
