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Design Stories: Exploring Everyday Things

CGE Hair Dryer Case, Back

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Magazine Advertisements
Beyond television, GE also commonly promoted their electric appliances in print magazines with advertisements that portrayed women using their hair dryers while performing various activities and household tasks. In one advertisement, a woman is depicted using her hair dryer while multitasking, showcasing six activities that could be done “while your hair dries” (Figure 10). With captions that read, “You can move around the room, do your sewing, or tend to baby while your hair dries,” and “Yes…even work! You’re free to move around and get dinner, do dishes,” (Figure 10), this imagery and messaging reinforced the notion that beauty maintenance should never interfere with a woman’s domestic responsibilities; the time spent drying one’s hair should not be wasted sitting down and relaxing, but rather taken as an opportunity to stay productive, tending to her home and children. In another print advertisement (Figure 11), a woman is portrayed talking on the phone while drying her hair, seemingly promoting the product’s convenience and seamless integration into everyday life. A notable feature of this advertisement is that this product is showcased adjacent to other home appliances by General Electric including a toaster and an iron. When observing this detail in relation to other GE advertisements, such as the one shown in Figure 12 for their earlier models of washers and ironers that feature illustrations of a woman using these household products, it can be assumed that this choice to advertise the beauty device alongside home appliances was an intentional and strategic effort to appeal to their long-time assumed audience of women and housewives, further reinforcing an association between domesticity and womanhood.
Moreover, the advertisements for this product not only promoted the hair dryer itself, but also reinforced broader cultural narratives that equated femininity and gender identity with domestic labour and external beauty. The consistent portrayal of elegant, well-groomed women in these advertisements can be interpreted as subtly playing on women consumers' insecurities and perpetuating the societal expectations for women to conform to rigid beauty standards.