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Almost 20 years ago, Procter & Gamble made consumers aware of an innovative design in snack packaging when it launched Pringles potato crisps in rounded canisters. Now, a number of other snack food marketers are seeing the wisdom of the Pringles canister concept, one that is especially advantageous for the chain drug channel.
Pringles has a major merchandising advantage for drug stores over Frito-Lay, because drug stores don't have the floor space to display towers of potato chips. "But when we put Pringles on sale in the nice canister, we can place them on the end cap and they go deep and long, and we sell a ton of them," the buyer said.
Humans have the unique ability to form abstract conceptions about themselves and to gaze at themselves as both the seer and the object being seen. This can cause conflict when the seer places unrealistic demands on him- or herself, especially on his or her own body.
As the advertising and film industries bombard the industrialized world with images of idealized beauty, more and more adolescents are forming negative body images and engaging in self-destructive behaviors to fit an unrealistic ideal.
Children begin to recognize themselves in mirrors in meaningful ways at about 18 months and begin perceiving themselves as physical beings in toddlerhood. School-age children are aware of how their bodies look, though relatively few focus an inappropriate amount of attention on them.
Ideally, children learn that their physical appearance is in many ways beyond their control and learn to accept their bodies without judgment. However, children living in the industrialized world are immersed in a culture that creates standards of idealized beauty and then connects those standards to personal worth. Consequently, school-age children can become convinced that they are only worthwhile if they live up to an idealized standard of physical appearance.
As puberty nears, children become increasingly focused on the appearance of their bodies. An adolescent may mature too quickly, too slowly, in a way that is unattractive, or in a way that makes the adolescent stand out in the crowd. Any deviation from the ideal can result in a negative body image, and adolescents may diet or use steroids to counter their own negative self concept.
Distorted body images in adolescence can lead to a number of disorders, such as anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa or dysmorphic disorder (a severe, clinically recognized illusory body image). These disorders are accompanied by psychological problems, such as depression or anxiety, as the victim magnifies a slight flaw to such a degree that all other aspects of personality and appearance are ignored.
Body odor is the unpleasant smell caused by the mixing of perspiration, or sweat, and bacteria on the skin. Sweat is generally an odorless body secretion. When bacteria multiply on the skin and break down these secretions, however, the resulting by-products may have a strong and disagreeable odor. This odor is often due to poor personal hygiene, but excessive perspiration or some other underlying disease are sometimes involved.
They seem to be everywhere these days--rings or metal studs or barbells in the nose, lips, tongues, eyebrows, navels, and ears. And you know there are rings in places you can't readily see.
Many kids appear to be turning to branding and scarification as the newest symbols of teenage rebellion. Scarification involves cutting a design into the skin and placing sand or another agent in the wound. It's an ancient form of body decoration still practiced by primitive cultures. Branding is performed using a branding iron with initials or some other design on a tip heated with an acetylene torch.
The soap opera form first developed on US radio in the 1920s, and expanded into television starting in the 1940s, and is normally shown during the daytime, hence the alternative name, daytime drama. The first concerted effort to air continuing drama occurred in 1946 on the DuMont television series Faraway Hill. Soap operas, in their present format, were introduced to television in 1949. Two long-running soaps, Search for Tomorrow and Love of Life, first started broadcasts in 1951.
The term "soap opera" originated from the fact that when these serial dramas were aired on daytime radio, the commercials aired during the shows were largely aimed at housewives. Many of the products sold during these commercials were laundry and cleaning items. This specific type of radio drama came to be associated with these particular commercials, and this gave rise to the term "soap opera" --a melodramatic story that aired commercials for soap products.
Most soaps follow the lives of a group of characters who live or work in a particular place. The storylines follow the day-to-day lives of these characters, who seem similar to ordinary people on the street — except that soap opera characters are usually more handsome, beautiful, seductive, and rich than the typical person watching the TV show. Soap operas take everyday, ordinary lives and exaggerate them to a degree where they are still plausible, yet are more dramatic.
Romances, secret relationships, extra-marital affairs, and genuine love has been the basis for the vast majority of soap operas. The most memorable soap opera characters, and the most compelling and popular storylines, have usually involved a romance between two characters, of the sort often presented in paperback romance novels.
Soap opera storylines weave intricate, convoluted, sometimes confusing tales of characters who have affairs, meet mysterious strangers and fall in love, are swept off their feet by dashing (yet treacherous) lovers, sneak behind their lovers' backs, and engage in other forms of adultery that keep their audiences returning to find out who is sleeping with whom, who has betrayed whom, who is having a baby, who is related to each other, and so on.
Remarkable (sometimes unbelievable) coincidences are used to enhance the drama in most soap operas. For example, if a young woman in a soap secretly has a single sexual encounter with her boyfriend back in high school, this forbidden affair will certainly come back to haunt her several years later...usually at the very moment that it would cause the most harm (such as on the day of her wedding).
Previously-unknown (and often evil) twins regularly emerge, and unexpected calamities disrupt weddings with unusual frequency. Much like comic books—another popular form of linear storytelling—a character's death is not guaranteed to be permanent without an on-camera corpse, and sometimes not even then.
A selfie is a self-portrait taken by a camera within a mobile phone or a tablet, held at an arm's length or in a mirror. It refers to the incredible explosion of images of the self that have not only populated the social web but also inspired multi-million dollar applications like Instagram that offer quick-fix solutions to badly taken pictures.
Whether it is the duck-faced pout, the tilted face with a smirk, the glowering eyes in a dimly lit room, or the full-length strut captured in a mirror, selfies are everywhere. Your profile picture on the social web or your avatar on your chat room or the last picture you uploaded on Twitter is most probably a selfie.
Many visual scientists and professionals have looked with disdain at the selfie. The critics have suggested that it feeds into the extraordinarily narcissistic cultures that the individualism and customisation of the internet offers. The selfie is a vanity shot — morphed, filtered, glossed and changed so that it comes close to our ideal of what we look like in our own heads.
If the original function of the camera was to capture an exterior reality and document the world around us, the selfie is a perversion because it only focuses on the person with the camera rather than the contexts within which they might be located.
Many complain that the selfie with its unimaginative visual vocabulary — if you look at one selfie, you have seen them all — also destroys the richness and creativity of visual language that has been established. The point-and-click cultures of the selfie encourage randomness and thoughtlessness, reducing the visual image to nothing more than a rehearsed act of serendipity.
Jealousy is a combination of emotional reactions, including fear, anger, and anxiety. Studies have shown that men and women tend to feel jealous for different reasons; for instance, physical attractiveness in a perceived rival is more likely to incite jealousy in a woman than in a man.
Everyone occasionally experiences normal jealousy; caring about anyone or anything means that one will become uncomfortable and anxious at the prospect of losing the desired person or object to another. An unhealthy degree of apathy would be required for an individual never to experience jealousy.
I'm 26 and have never wanted children. Last year, however, two lines appeared on a pregnancy test, and 41 weeks later the girl was born. I pleaded and begged my husband throughout the pregnancy to sign adoption papers with me. He refused. He is in the military and was gone through most of the last seven months. We now live thousands of miles from my family, and I am miserable, stuck with a colicky baby who still doesn't sleep through the night.
I find no joy, no pleasure and no love being a mother. I can't sleep knowing I must wake up to a crying baby and the same routine of feeding, diapers, baths and bottles. I have become more and more detached from the girl and have nothing to enjoy. Showers are short. Dinners are rushed and usually cold. I can't even enjoy a cup of coffee without looking over my shoulder to see where the girl is. I don't want her to touch me, and I can barely hide my revulsion when I have to pick her up.
I am exhausted beyond belief, and my thoughts are turning darker every day. It's not the girl's fault she was born, but I can't help feeling resentment and anger toward this little person who more and more resembles a block of concrete on my feet. We can't afford day care, and we have no friends or relatives remotely close by. I can't stand to wake up much longer, and these long stretches of crying have my nerves shot and my hands itching to shake the girl until she shuts up. (I have never shaken her.)
You may be suffering from postpartumdepression, a hormonal condition that is treatable, and you may need a respite from motherhood. Once your chemistry is balanced again, consider making a trip to visit your family for a few weeks. If you leave the baby with your husband, and he must assume responsibility for her care in your absence, he may begin to see the wisdom of placing her with a family who really wants her and is willing to accept the responsibility that goes along with having a baby. Please don't wait.
