Jessica Simpson's The Price of Beauty
In this show, Jessica travels to a number of countries in order to learn what beauty, beauty for women, means in the different cultures. She is accompanied by her hair, makeup, and clothing stylist, Ken Paves, along with her friend CaCee Cobb. In each location that they travel to they have a "Beauty Ambassador," who teaches them about the definition of beauty in that country. The show is 30 minutes long, which means about 20 minutes of actual footage- let's see how the show goes...
In the season opener, Jessica goes to Thailand with two friends, and the first thing that they do is get a Thai massage (this is supposed to help one have better posture). Then, they check in with their Beauty Ambassador, who takes them around a local flea market, tells them that eating bugs speeds up a person's metabolism. Next, the Ambassador talks about makeup, and tells them how having pale skin something that is wanted because being tan shows that you are a worker. In order to further her explanation of this and point out how bad this is for a person, she takes them to see a woman whose skin has been destroyed by chemicals that is used to bleach skin. After this, they go and meet with a Buddhist monk, who teaches the three of them that a true Buddhist believes that beauty comes from within. The last thing that they do, is visit the Karen tribe, where the women wear rings around their necks in order to elongate them, which is a sign of beauty and wealth. The three of them "try out" this ritual to understand it, and also get to see a girl having the rings put on for the first time.
My take:
This episode has a very slow start, with the continuing joke of how Jessica keeps wearing high heels, which if you watched the show, you would understand why it is humorous, but ridiculous at the same time. The first thing they do is get a massage, which might be part of the beauty regimen for women, but was unnecessary to the show and didn't really teach the audience anything about the culture. Throughout most of the episode, the three of them are giggling about the things that they are doing which comes off as somewhat offensive, with somewhat fleeting moments of them really taking everything in and understanding what it is that they are being taught. (However, surprisingly Ken is the only one who seems to be respecting the culture the most, having to shush the girls at some moments and being respectful of the people that they meet.) At the end of the episode, I feel like they begin to respect what they are doing and being shown, which is a good sign. I wish the episode was longer, and that they were able to do/show more things, but we can't have everything.
Well, we'll see what happens tomorrow night.
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