Blurring boundaries in beauty advertising. A multimodal critical discourse analysis.

As content related to cosmetic procedures has rapidly increased in today’s social media landscape, Instagram represents a highly popular platform for advertising of cosmetic procedure clinics. In Germany specifically, the numbers of cosmetic procedures are continuously rising; especially in the case of non-surgical cosmetic procedures, the industry is increasingly blurring with the non-medical cosmetic product industry. This blurring process is related to two mutually influencing developments, which are the normalization of cosmetic procedures but also the medicalization of cosmetic products. Therefore, this study aims to answer the following overarching research question: How are cosmetic products and cosmetic procedures conceptually linked in advertising on social media by German Instagram accounts of cosmetic brands and clinics? A multimodal critical discourse analysis is conducted by scrutinizing the images and captions of selected Instagram posts by German accounts of both cosmetic brands and non-surgical cosmetic procedure clinics. The main findings are that cosmetic procedures are normalized in Instagram advertising by emphasizing natural results of procedures, omitting medical information, incorporating influencers, and aligning cosmetic procedures to other regular beauty routines. Simultaneously, cosmetic product brands draw on both scientised and medical discourse and borrow terminology from cosmeceutical as well as cosmetic procedure advertising, blurring the boundary between industries. Overall, cosmetic products and cosmetic procedures are conceptually linked by drawing on similar beauty ideals and post-feminist as well as neoliberal discourses to convince women to strive for health and youth by using the advertised products and services. The brands and clinics incorporate their knowledge and expertise in order to position themselves as educators of audiences, providing them with power and persuasive abilities.