Are you a ‘Good Girl’?

I went to a breakfast event recently held in a luxury hotel in Melbourne by a women’s business support group. It was impressive, with delicious food including scones, jam and cream, banana bread, savoury croissants and coffee. There were also freebies from Kombucha to perfume.  The speaker was Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat Pray Love, and I was most interested when she made a statement that totally reflected my own sentiments and which form the foundation of my work.  She shared her thoughts on how our existing capitalist culture thrives by convincing us we are not ok. That is how brands get us to buy. She was inspiring and encouraged us to be in our own true relaxed selves.

I will talk more about Elizabeth in my next blog but I was curious and impelled to write about the free perfume sample of Good Girl by Carolina Herrara we were gifted.

The Good Girl brand uses words like ‘The New Feminine Fragrance’ and talks of the power of the heel. Here is something I copied from the Carolina Herrara website:

Power of the Heel

Heels are the ultimate symbol of power, igniting passions with their extreme sensuality. Completing that ‘femme fatale’ look, the GOOD GIRL bottle defies the laws of earthly attraction, combining haute couture aesthetics with technical expertise. If you give a girl the right shoe, she can conquer the world.

The website goes on:

WELL-BEHAVED GIRLS RARELY MAKE HISTORY

GOOD GIRL — a fragrance as powerful as it is sensual. An audacious blend of dark and light elements. For the woman who loves her good side and celebrates her bad side.

Carolina Herrara is not alone, look at some of the other words used to encourage us to think our lives will be so much better if we use their products

Larger than life (Flowerbomb)

The ideal love declaration (Miss Dior)

The future is gold (J’adore)

Sensual, enveloping (Chanel No 5)

I am made of blue sky and golden light, and I will feel this way forever…share the fantasy (Chanel No 5)

I am not a girl, I am poison (Poison)

The romantic perfume (L’Air du Temps)

Promise her anything, but give her Arpege (Arpege)

Let desire lead you (JLO Deseo)

Even the containers are beautifully designed with shapes inspired by naked torsos, diamonds, exotic fans, sensual colours and so on.

Seriously, can a prettily packaged concoction of man-made chemicals make these claims?

Let’s look at the imagery used in Good Girl.

The colours black and gold are associated with luxury.

The GOOD GIRL logo is set in bold capital letters which command attention. The serif type gives it a level of traditional sophistication. But the main aspect that pulls our focus is the vesica piscis derived from the intersection of two Os in GOOD.  It is a mystical shape symbolising the intersection of the world of the divine with the world of matter and the beginning of creation to give birth to the entire manifest universe. This ancient symbol is also associated with the Goddess Venus and with representing female genitalia

Contrast that with the ‘devil wears Prada’ high heel imagery that visually flips us between the good and the bad, or, maybe, the ugly.

Perhaps to counter these clichéd claims in Calvin Klein took a bold stance, on August 2018, by taking over the The Sunday Times Style magazine cover and displaying close-up portraits of inspiring women including Eartha Kitt, Katherine Hepburn and Lupita Nyongo all promoting Calvin Klein’s Women against the strapline ‘I am Woman’.

Again, do we really need a bottle of chemicals to define our sex? And did Eartha Kitt and Katherine Hepburn agree to this, if so how? They died in 2008 and 2003 respectively.

Come on girls, we are better than this

Isn’t it time we looked to our own innate, individual, exceptional gifts that each of us inherently have, rather than hope that a splash of a synthetic concoction can change our lives for the better, empower us or make us feel attractive/powerful/sexier/better?

Let’s just be: we are enough. It is time to relax into our true selves and live the lives we were born to. It is time to discard the lives being designed for us by those who want to benefit from the insecurities they plant in our minds.

It is our time.