There's nothing new about makeover montages in movies. They are often fun to watch. However, as I've gotten older, I see that these "important" makeovers can be damaging to young girls. You may not agree with me, but think about the kinds of characteristics the female protagonists have to "fix" concerning their appearance in order to be considered attractive by the other characters. The girl in the before photo often has curly hair, glasses, and/or braces and wears little to no makeup. I've had curly hair my whole life and grew up watching these movies where the girl with unruly curls nine times out of ten had her hair straightened in her new and improved look.
The most prominent example that has always stuck with me was The Princess Diaries. I remember being so excited about Princess Mia because she looked more like me than any other Disney heroine I'd ever seen. She had thick eyebrows,glasses, and, most exciting for me, thick, curly hair! She wasn't graceful or blessed with great public speaking and social skills either.
My time to shine was here...or so I thought. When Paulo gave Mia her royal makeover, he broke her glasses after he broke his hairbrush trying to brush out her hair, an all too relatable moment in the thick, curly hair struggle. Then he proceeded to wax her eyebrows and straighten her hair. After that (and finding out she was the princess of Genovia), everyone was so much nicer to Mia Thermopolis. I mean, a guy sat on her before the makeover because she was apparently invisible to most people!
I never made waves about it at the time since it is still an excellent movie and I was only a little girl, but something inside of me deflated after that. It was around that time, at six years old, that I truly started hating my curls. A couple of years later, I asked my mom to straighten my hair frequently. I straightened my hair more and more often until about my sophomore year of high school. That's when I started embracing my curls, or at least, not hating them. Another less obvious example is the case of the movie portrayal of Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter series. In the books, Hermione has the wild, bushy hair similar to the way Emma Watson's hair was styled in the first two movies. From Prisoner of Azkaban on, Hermione had much tamer curls. Even in the books in Goblet of Fire, Hermione's Yule Ball Cinderella moment included her hair being tamed.
A lot of these plot devices are so insidious that we often don't even notice them. Then again, some are so blatant that you can't help but notice them. No one could reasonably say that Anne Hathaway or Emma Watson are ugly no matter what the costume department tries to convince the viewer of, but the physical "deformities" portrayed are always the same. The same can be said of America Ferrara in Ugly Betty. Giving a girl glasses and braces does not make her ugly!
