Celebrity Image Research Articles

Instagram as an Arena of Climate Change Communication and Mobilization: A Discourse Network Analysis of COP26

ABSTRACT Conference of the Parties (COP) meetings on climate change are opportunities for social movements and other non-state actors to engage in climate change communication and mobilization. We focus on Instagram as an online arena of climate communication and mobilization during COP26, held in Glasgow. Instagram is a distinct arena for eco-political communication and activism because of its visual focus and generally younger user base. Using a Discourse Network Analysis approach, we analyse 2417 posts to examine relationships and alignments across imagery, discourses, and actors. Instagram serves as a space to articulate critical counter-discourses of climate justice, Indigenous rights, and individual action as a response to perceived failures of COP processes and formal agreements. At the same time, images of celebrities and politicians structure much of the Instagram discourse network. This highlights how Instagram contributes to a celebritization of climate politics, with individual political actors positioned as climate heroes or villains.

The Interplay Between Celebrity Image Rights and the Tort of Passing off: An Examination of the Rihanna v Topshop Case and Its Implications

In the era of globalization, the acts of counterfeiting and infringement against celebrities have occurred all over the world. The “classic trinity” test, established by Lord Oliver in the Jif Lemon case, is widely regarded as the most reliable method for proving a passing-off allegation. To succeed, the claimant must demonstrate the following three elements: goodwill, misrepresentation, and damage or the likelihood of damage. This article delves into the intersection of celebrity image rights and the tort of passing off within the UK legal framework. This article highlights the challenges celebrities face in protecting their likeness in the absence of a codified image right in the UK, contrasting this with the broader approach seen in the United States. Additionally, it examines the necessity for celebrities to establish local goodwill to succeed in passing-off claims, as evidenced by the Starbucks (HK) Ltd v British Sky Broadcasting Group Plc case. The paper emphasizes the delicate balance between free competition and protection against unfair competition, illustrating the complexities involved in enforcing celebrity image rights through passing off.

Consumer Perception of Innovative Fruit and Cereal Bars-Current and Future Perspectives.

The aim of the study was to ascertain consumers' interest in innovative fruit and cereal bars and their expectations of changes that could be applied by manufacturers to improve their health-promoting properties. An additional aim was to assess how these interests and expectations, as well as the information provided on the product label, determine the willingness to purchase a fruit and cereal bar with health-promoting properties. Data were collected through a quantitative CAWI survey conducted in 2020. It involved 1034 respondents. A logistic regression model was developed in which the dependent variable was the respondents' interest in an innovative fruit and cereal bar on whose packaging the manufacturer declared its health-promoting properties. It was found that producers' efforts to change the packaging to an organic one (OR = 1.24) along with enriching the product with chia seeds/flaxseed (OR = 1.22), vitamins and minerals (OR = 1.19), as well as fruit (OR = 1.14) and protein (OR = 1.12), or removing ingredients that cause allergies, would significantly increase the chance of respondents purchasing such a bar. A celebrity image and a claim that the product "helps maintain a healthy body weight" on the label would also encourage purchases. On the other hand, reducing the sugar content or enriching a fruit and cereal bar with powdered insects would significantly reduce the propensity to buy it.

Marketing Strategy of Sponsorship Events and Celebrity Endorsement to Increase Consumer Brand Awareness of Kapal Api Products

This research was conducted to examine the influence of event sponsorship on brand awareness. Addressing this theme in a journal is of significant value in terms of contributing to industry understanding, knowledge development, and practical applications in brand marketing strategies like Kapal Api. The study employed a qualitative approach by reviewing previous research and relating it to a case study of Kapal Api. Based on the case study of Kapal Api, Indonesian badminton athletes play the role of celebrity endorsers for the Kapal Api brand. The compatibility of a celebrity endorser with a product refers to the alignment of the celebrity's image, values, and behaviors with the desired impression of the advertised brand. The findings of the research indicate that the sponsorship strategy implemented by Kapal Api successfully increased consumer brand awareness, particularly among badminton enthusiasts. The study also demonstrates that the inclusion of celebrity endorsers, specifically badminton athletes, further enhances the success of Kapal Api's event sponsorship strategy. The study highlights the potential effectiveness of sponsorship events and celebrity endorsements in increasing consumer awareness of Kapal Api products. This suggests that implementing these strategies could lead to heightened recognition and visibility for the brand among consumers.

Role of Celebrity Endorsement in Luxury Brand Marketing: A Study of Consumer Preferences in China

Purpose: The aim of the study was to investigate the role of celebrity endorsement in luxury brand marketing: a study of consumer preferences in china Methodology: This study adopted a desk methodology. A desk study research design is commonly known as secondary data collection. This is basically collecting data from existing resources preferably because of its low cost advantage as compared to a field research. Our current study looked into already published studies and reports as the data was easily accessed through online journals and libraries. Findings: The study on celebrity endorsements in luxury brand marketing in China revealed that celebrities significantly shape consumer preferences. Cultural relevance is crucial, as celebrities admired by Chinese consumers have a stronger impact. Aligning the celebrity's image with the brand's values enhances credibility. Authentic endorsements, perceived as genuine, are more effective. Overall, the study emphasizes the influential role of celebrities in shaping consumer perceptions of luxury brands in China. Unique Contribution to Theory, Practice and Policy: Social identity theory, self-congruity theory & information processing theory may be used to anchor future studies on the role of celebrity endorsement in luxury brand marketing: a study of consumer preferences in china. It emphasizes the need to tailor endorsement strategies to Chinese cultural values, prioritize authenticity, leverage social media platforms, and invest in long-term partnerships with celebrities. From a policy perspective, the study underscores the importance of transparency, ethical standards, and consumer protection in celebrity endorsement agreements within the Chinese market.

Text-Guided Synthesis of Masked Face Images

The COVID-19 pandemic has made us all understand that wearing a face mask protects us from the spread of respiratory viruses. The face authentication systems, which are trained on the basis of facial key points such as the eyes, nose, and mouth, found it difficult to identify the person when the majority of the face is covered by the face mask. Removing the mask for authentication will cause the infection to spread. The possible solutions are: (a) to train the face recognition systems to identify the person with the upper face features (b) Reconstruct the complete face of the person with a generative model. (c) train the model with a dataset of the masked faces of the people. In this paper, we explore the scope of generative models for image synthesis. We used stable diffusion to generate masked face images of popular celebrities on various text prompts. A realistic dataset of 15K masked face images of 100 celebrities is generated and is called the Realistic Synthetic Masked Face Dataset (RSMFD). The model and the generated dataset will be made public so that researchers can augment the dataset. According to our knowledge, this is the largest masked face recognition dataset with realistic images. The generated images were tested on popular deep face recognition models and achieved significant results. The dataset is also trained and tested on some of the famous image classification models, and the results are competitive. The dataset is available on this link:- https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1yetcgUOL1TOP4rod1geGsOkIrIJHtcEw?usp=sharing

Frontal facial analysis of female celebrity attractiveness standards through artificial intelligence

The contemporary significance of celebrities’ facial aesthetics underscores their heightened importance in shaping attractiveness standards. This retrospective study aimed to investigate the impact of patterns on aesthetic canons in the profile views of female celebrities, using artificial intelligence. The study sought to compare different races and propose standards for attractive faces.In this retrospective cohort study, a Python-based algorithm was used to analyze frontal patterns and evaluate their influence on aesthetic norms in publicly accessible images of female global celebrities. Ten ideal angular or proportional measures were gathered from the literature, and were trained to serve as a benchmark for the analysis of facial attractiveness. Demographic characteristics were described statistically. A one-way ANOVA test was employed to assess data distribution. Differences in means between groups were evaluated using nonparametric independent-sample tests, with statistical significance set at < 0.05.The study involved facial analyses for 115 female celebrities. It revealed variations in facial features among races. The mean golden ratio differed, with African and Asian individuals showing lower ratios. Symmetry varied, with Latin and Caucasian faces considered the most symmetrical. The zygomatic-to-mandibular width ratio was similar across races, with a ratio close to 80% being associated with more attractive faces. Differences in nose-to-mouth ratio, lips, alar base width, and chin angle were noted among race groups.The study concluded that, regardless of race, an attractive female face is characterized by specific ratios and angles. Facial symmetry, though desirable, is not strictly necessary. Irrespective of race background, an appealing female face is characterized by a zygomatic-to-mandibular width ratio nearing 80%, a mid-facial third that is slightly larger than the lower third, and a distinctive chin angle of approximately 138°, contributing to a trapezoidal facial shape. The findings contribute valuable insights into attractiveness standards and the impact of frontal patterns on aesthetic canons in female celebrities.

DreamIdentity: Enhanced Editability for Efficient Face-Identity Preserved Image Generation

While large-scale pre-trained text-to-image models can synthesize diverse and high-quality human-centric images, an intractable problem is how to preserve the face identity and follow the text prompts simultaneously for conditioned input face images and texts. Despite existing encoder-based methods achieving high efficiency and decent face similarity, the generated image often fails to follow the textual prompts. To ease this editability issue, we present DreamIdentity, to learn edit-friendly and accurate face-identity representations in the word embedding space. Specifically, we propose self-augmented editability learning to enhance the editability for projected embedding, which is achieved by constructing paired generated celebrity's face and edited celebrity images for training, aiming at transferring mature editability of off-the-shelf text-to-image models in celebrity to unseen identities. Furthermore, we design a novel dedicated face-identity encoder to learn an accurate representation of human faces, which applies multi-scale ID-aware features followed by a multi-embedding projector to generate the pseudo words in the text embedding space directly. Extensive experiments show that our method can generate more text-coherent and ID-preserved images with negligible time overhead compared to the standard text-to-image generation process.

Historic British Royal Memes

Historic British Royal Memes

‘Forget it’s between two women’: negotiating a queer Virginia Woolf in Chanya Button’s Vita & Virginia

ABSTRACT This article explores the gendered authorial negotiations at work in adaptations of Virginia Woolf’s works and celebrity image in screen media, focusing on a case study of Vita and Virginia (2018) directed by British filmmaker Chanya Button. The article discusses Button’s film’s textual and promotional strategies, considering how it adapts both Eileen Atkins’ 1995 play of the same name and original historical correspondence between Woolf and the writer Vita Sackville-West. It draws upon critical models of literary celebrity, the celebrity biopic, and the concept of adaptation networks to argue that Button’s strategic choices in cinematography and details of mise-en-scène formulate an ‘archival’ gaze in order to forge connections between Woolf and Button as gendered authorial and celebrity personas. This creates a visual dialogue between women authors across media and time. The article suggests that Button’s processes of adaptation work to destabilise the essential queerness of the epistolary material and literary celebrity images as a result of this archival technique. This produces a representation of queer desire that distances body and mind and privileges an intellectual romance above a physical, desiring and embodied queer sexuality. This ultimately reinforces rather than reframes or reimagines a popular image of Woolf’s literary celebrity, focused instead on her status as a melancholic, suffering figure.

A visual paired associate learning (vPAL) paradigm to study memory consolidation during sleep.

Sleep improves the consolidation and long-term stability of newly formed memories and associations. Most research on human declarative memory and its consolidation during sleep uses word-pair associations requiring exhaustive learning. In the present study, we present the visual paired association learning (vPAL) paradigm, in which participants learn new associations between images of celebrities and animals. The vPAL is based on a one-shot exposure that resembles learning in natural conditions. We tested if vPAL can reveal a role for sleep in memory consolidation by assessing the specificity of memory recognition, and the cued recall performance, before and after sleep. We found that a daytime nap improved the stability of recognition memory and discrimination abilities compared to identical intervals of wakefulness. By contrast, cued recall of associations did not exhibit significant sleep-dependent effects. High-density electroencephalography during naps further revealed an association between sleep spindle density and stability of recognition memory. Thus, the vPAL paradigm opens new avenues for future research on sleep and memory consolidation across ages and heterogeneous populations in health and disease.

Exploring Fans' Perceptions of Female Power and Empowerment in Media Communication: A Case Study of Blackpink and Its Fandom

With the rapid development of K-pop culture globally, its popularity has influenced all aspects of culture and media communication. Social media, being dynamic and participatory, allows individuals to express their opinions. While previous studies highlight K-pop's impact in Western countries, the 'Ban on Korean Culture' policy in China presents a unique case worth exploring. This paper references Blackpink and its fandom to discuss the relationship between fandom perception and female empowerment in media communication. Using quantitative methods and thematic analysis, author will analyze comments and posts on Bilibili. Focusing on Blackpink's activities on Bilibili, the study evaluates three specific events involving the group through the lens of female power and empowerment. This paper will explore different representations of female power in their music videos and fan opinions. Additionally, the study considers how agency companies shape celebrity images. The examination includes debates around Lisa’s Crazy Horse event and Jennie's refusal to sing disrespectful lyrics, highlighting diverse perceptions of female empowerment. This study underscores the interplay between cultural communication and localized interpretations, providing insights into how female power and representation are negotiated in K-pop culture, especially on Chinese social media.

Chiara Ferragni, fashion and digital brand-mom activism

Chiara Ferragni is a renowned fashion influencer and transnational celebrity. After her hyper-celebrated marriage with Italian rapper Fedez and the creation of the international celebrity brand Ferragnez, Chiara Ferragni is now a full transmedia celebrity, with the docu-film Chiara Ferragni-Unposted (2019) and her participation in the 2023 Sanremo Festival, the main national popular television singing event in Italy. The aim of this article is to analyse Ferragni’s transmedia communication during her Sanremo appearances through her use of fashion as a communicative strategy to raise awareness of the complexity of maternal identity. My argument is that Chiara Ferragni’s maternal celebrity image is an example of what I label digital brand-mom activism: her maternal identity becomes part of the self-branding and is framed in the neo-liberal emphasis of individual choice and ‘have it all’ mentality popularized by Sheryl Sandberg and her Lean In manifesto. The maternal crisis is thus resolved in a generic and superficial exhortation to ‘be yourself’, without questioning the real reasons of the contemporary crisis of motherhood, related to persistent gender stereotypes and structural social impediments for working mothers.

The Research on Chanel's Strategy of Using Celebrity Images to Enrich the Brand Narrative

While numerous studies have shown that choosing an image that matches a brand as an ambassador is good for telling a brand story, there hasn't been much in-depth research and analysis on how brands can tell a good brand story through its ambassador. This research will take the Chanel brand as an example to explore the role of its ambassador in its brand narrative, and summarize the rules to contribute to enriching the theories related to brand narrative. The results of the study prove the importance of the matching degree of the ambassador's visual image and the celebrity's personality image with the brand narrative and their charm to the brand narrative effect. It also shows that Chanel becomes a symbol of a desirable lifestyle through celebrity endorsements by giving the product value in addition to the function of use. Key implications of brand ambassador are discussed along with recommendations for future research about brand narrative.

FaceGAN: Robust Face Recognition using Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) Algorithm

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are a type of neural network that can generate synthetic images that are often indistinguishable from real ones. The article explores GAN to augment existing datasets or generate new ones for training classifiers. The competitive training process of GANs results in a generator network that can produce increasingly realistic images to create more diverse and balanced datasets for training classifiers. The article discusses several successful applications of GANs in image classification, including object recognition, face classification, and medical image analysis. The datasets used in this article are CelebA and FER2013. The CelebA dataset consists of 202,599 celebrity images with 40 attributes, such as gender, age, and facial hair. The FER2013 dataset consists of 35,887 images of faces with seven other emotions, including anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, surprise, and neutral. The dataset is divided into training, validation, and test sets. We resized the images to 64x64 pixels and normalized the pixel values between -1 and 1, then trained a GAN model using the dataset. We evaluate the performance of our approach and compare it with several state-of-the-art methods, including Support Vector Machines (SVM) and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). We evaluate the performance of our approach and compare it with several state-of-the-art methods, including Support Vector Machines (SVM) and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), with the results that our approach outperforms SVM and CNN methods on both datasets, achieving a classification accuracy of 89.2% on CelebA and 72.5% in FER2013. Meanwhile, classification accuracy on SVM was 82.3% on CelebA and 65.4% on FER2013. Classification accuracy on CNN is 87.9% on CelebA and 70.8% on FER2013.

The Silent Enemy (1930) and n’Daki Menan: Reclaiming Mise-en-Scène as Authorial Expression

Paramount Pictures’ The Silent Enemy, released in 1930, is a fascinating cultural artifact made and released during the transition from silent to sound film. One of the last silent feature films made by the studio, this critically acclaimed film took three years to make and was shot in large part on location on n’Daki Menan, the traditional territory of the Teme Augama Anishnabai in northern Ontario. Like other silent films made in Indigenous communities during this period such as Curtis’ In the Land of the Head Hunters (1914) and Myles’ The Daughter of Dawn (1920), The Silent Enemy employed local Indigenous actors and drew on their knowledge and traditions to construct its vision of pre-contact Anishinaabe life. While the exact location and community are never mentioned in The Silent Enemy itself, local Anishinaabe people were hired to act in the film and make the costumes and sets according to pre-contact standards, all elements of the film form that added greatly to the production’s claims of authenticity. This cultural labour went uncredited and unacknowledged. While the film recycles the prominent ethnographic narrative of the dying “Indian” culture, it does feature ironic moments of Indigenous survivance, such as an introductory sequence with Chief Yellow Robe shot in synchronized sound, naturalistic performances, material culture designed by locals that continue to captivate community members, and over-the-top colonial takes on pre-contact life. Until now, most readings of this silent feature focused on the celebrity image of Chief Long Lance and his “outing” as an African American and its use of Native American actors in leading roles, but for far too long, the story of its long-lasting influence as both a personal and a public historical artifact for the Teme Augama Anishnabai has not been told. The authors’ method for telling this story will alternate between oral storytelling and scholarly analysis of the film’s formal and thematic elements. The authors hope that by drawing on oral and traditional storytelling approaches, Indigenous ways of knowing will be foregrounded.

BODY IMAGE PERCEPTIONS AT CRITICAL AGE PERIODS: FOCUS ON WOMEN’S SELF-CONFIDENCE AND WELL-BEING

Body image is a crucial part of subjective experience in daily life. Most women are concerned with their body transformations due to pregnancy, delivery, breastfeeding, menopause, weight gain and obesity, serious gynecological and other diseases. Body image perceptions may influence women’s health, sexuality, fertility, and social behavior.&#x0D; Popularized images of slim models and celebrities adversely affect women’s perceptions of beauty and attractiveness. The difference between the perceived body image and desired silhouette may result in body image dissatisfaction. Outlook comparisons may influence the quality of life and result in anxiety, loss of confidence, and sexual ill-health.

The Influence of Disney's Classic Image and Internet Celebrity Image on Consumers' Consumption Intention

With the popularity of the new Disney image, Lina Bell, people are curious about whether these Internet celebrity images will have different impact on consumer behavior. Given the fact that Micky Mouse, the classic image of Disney, has unique significance for generations, this paper aims to compare these two kinds of images and study the impact of them on consumption intention. Based on our research, we hope to give suggestions on the choice of corporate image and product design. In this paper, we obtained data by distributing a questionnaire on the Internet, which measures five variables named informative, entertainment, conviction, attention and intention. Then, we not only used descriptive statistical analysis, but also applied quantitative methods such as correlation analysis, regression analysis and analysis of variance to interpret the data. Finally, we reached some conclusions: 1) young females show higher consumption intention when it comes to Disney’s products; 2) consumption intention has a stronger relationship with the entertainment and conviction; 3) most of the people still prefer traditional images despite the increasing popularity of Internet celebrity images.

Rethinking Portrait Matting with Privacy Preserving

Recently, there has been an increasing concern about the privacy issue raised by identifiable information in machine learning. However, previous portrait matting methods were all based on identifiable images. To fill the gap, we present P3M-10k, which is the first large-scale anonymized benchmark for Privacy-Preserving Portrait Matting (P3M). P3M-10k consists of 10,421 high resolution face-blurred portrait images along with high-quality alpha mattes, which enables us to systematically evaluate both trimap-free and trimap-based matting methods and obtain some useful findings about model generalization ability under the privacy preserving training (PPT) setting. We also present a unified matting model dubbed P3M-Net that is compatible with both CNN and transformer backbones. To further mitigate the cross-domain performance gap issue under the PPT setting, we devise a simple yet effective Copy and Paste strategy (P3M-CP), which borrows facial information from public celebrity images and directs the network to reacquire the face context at both data and feature level. Extensive experiments on P3M-10k and public benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of P3M-Net over state-of-the-art methods and the effectiveness of P3M-CP in improving the cross-domain generalization ability, implying a great significance of P3M for future research and real-world applications. The dataset, code and models are available here (https://github.com/ViTAE-Transformer/P3M-Net).

Evaluating Trustworthiness and Racial Bias in Face Recognition APIs Using Deepfakes

We evaluate the racial bias in face recognition application programming interfaces (APIs) using real and deepfake celebrity images. We use deepfake generation methods to introduce small, imperceptible changes to the real images to shift the racial class of predictions, showing how deepfake images exacerbated racial bias in web-based face recognition APIs.