Abstract In advertising for female beauty brands, there is a growing trend towards breaking with standardized, non-inclusive, and non-intersectional beauty canons regarding age, body size, and ethnic origin in the representation of femininities. This shift favours diversity in beauty and promotes messages that move away from an ideal of immaculate external beauty, instead reclaiming an inner beauty shaped by self-esteem and confidence, typical phenomenon of confidence culture (Gill/Orgad 2017). This trend falls within femvertising , a phenomenon coined in 2014, characterized by pro-female advertising messages that aim to challenge gender stereotypes and avoid ideological or sexist biases, with the goal of fostering women’s empowerment. This article aims to examine the discursive forms that female empowerment adopts in advertising and to determine whether such advertising achieves genuine social transformation towards normalized beauty or, on the contrary, may carry harmful and problematic implications. To this end, through a case study, four advertising spots from Shiseido’s Kintsugi campaign are analysed using an interdisciplinary methodology that combines the analysis of the five parameters defining femvertising (Becker-Herby 2016) with multimodal visual analysis (Kress/van Leeuwen 2006) and feminist critical discourse analysis (Lazar 2014). The combination of these approaches allows us to determine the degree of female empowerment encapsulated in an apparently pro-female advertising message, and to assess its position in relation to the oppression exerted by traditional beauty standards.
Antonia Montés (Thu,) studied this question.