Pretty Hurts video recreates a beauty pageant, where we can see female characters changing their appearance to win the competition. This video tries to transmit how much pain women have to suffer in order to be considered “beautiful” ( the signified) for the society´s eyes. …show more content…
While she is thinking the question appear one shot where she dives into the water, the water could symbolize that she is dying inside because she is not really happy. Other think to keep in mind respect to happiness is the yellow outfits, which all the participants wear in several shots. Yellow is meant to connote happiness, but really it’s just used to mask what they truly feel. As matter of fact, all the outfits, the glitz and the glam plus the smiles just hide the horrible truth of what these women go through in order to appear on the stage. From this, we can conclude that the signifier in a first moment tries to cheat the audience transmitting that the signified is the beauty, but in reality the `` true signified´´ and therefore the message behind all the video is ``the happiness´´. The signifier transmit to the public that the most important thing in life is ``be happy´´, because you can be the most beautiful girl in the world, but if you are not really happy that is worthless.
Additionally, the song 's lyrics deal with the consequences of society 's high standards of beauty, and in "Pretty Hurts" eating disorders are depicted as one of the subjected results. This can be seen in several scenes on the video such as when Beyoncé goes to the toilet to provoke her own vomit or when one of the female characters eats cotton to satisfy her