Beauty Costs: Girls, beauty and advertising
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 2 December 2022
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
More than ever girls are bombarded by images that have been curated, filtered and touched up. How can we help girls decode those images and understand that ideals of beauty are constructed by society and change across time and place?
Shelina Janmohamed is an author and advertising executive. Her latest book is designed to help girls aged eight and above build confidence in how they look and show them why what appears to be beautiful isn't as straight forward as it seems.
Shelina tells presenter Rabiya Limbada why her career in advertising led her to write this book and why helping girls become more savvy consumers is good for business. Rabiya also speaks to six girls - Hanaa, Haleemah, Helen, Hana, Sophia and Amatullah - about what they think beautiful is, their experience of filtered images and how confident they feel about how they look.
Presenter: Rabiya Limbada Producer: Carmel O'Grady (Image: Young girl at beauty counter / Credit: Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Business Daily. |
| 0:05.1 | In our final episode of this week's Beauty Cost series, |
| 0:09.1 | Rabia Lombarda looks into the world of beauty, advertising and girls. |
| 0:15.3 | To me, beautiful is like something that's perfect, |
| 0:18.6 | like a perfect thing or a perfect object that it's nice to look at. |
| 0:22.7 | According to Forbes, the global beauty industry is worth more than $500 billion and it's growing. |
| 0:29.1 | With such huge spending comes huge advertising budgets. |
| 0:33.3 | Advertising plays a huge role in how we create our cultures. There's a lot of work to do, but |
| 0:39.1 | already we can see the joy that consumers have when they see themselves represented. |
| 0:44.5 | How do we help girls understand that the images and adverts they see are designed to make them |
| 0:50.1 | think they need to spend more to be more beautiful? |
| 0:55.5 | Shalina Jamm Ahmed is attempting to do just that. |
| 0:58.8 | As women and girls, we can be what we want to be. |
| 1:02.3 | We don't need to wait for others to give us permission |
| 1:04.8 | and we certainly shouldn't need to abide by the constraints that they impose upon us. |
| 1:09.6 | Shalina is the vice president of the world's first bespoke global Islamic advertising agency. |
| 1:16.1 | Shalina is also an author and has combined her expertise in her latest book. |
| 1:20.9 | We live in a world where women are constantly pressured to look a particular way, |
| 1:26.3 | to behave in a particular way, to speak in a particular way, to speak in a |
| 1:29.2 | particular way, to downplay their opinions. And so it feels very competitive. It feels very |
| 1:35.8 | constrained. It feels very oppressive. That if you could find that one way to be beautiful, |
| 1:42.3 | that one opinion, that one stereotype to live up to, perhaps you |
... |
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