Feminism and emotional persuasion in social media beauty advertising: a multimodal critical genre analysis of Douyin

Beauty influencer advertising (BIA) has emerged as a distinctive form of digital advertising and an increasingly valuable strategy for beauty brand promotion. This study focuses on a highly commercialised subset of BIA produced by mega beauty influencers on Douyin. On this platform, promotional messages in such elite influencer advertising are woven into everyday sharing, tutorial performance, and low-pressure participation, while the aesthetic practices promoted in this content may intensify appearance anxiety among young Chinese women. Drawing on Bhatia’s framework of advertising rhetorical structure and Kress and van Leeuwen’s visual grammar, this study examines 25 beauty advertising videos posted by five mega beauty influencers on Douyin. It explores how this form of mega-influencer BIA is rhetorically organised, how multimodal resources are deployed to realise persuasion, and what ideological logic underpins this advertising discourse. Findings show that, within this elite sample, BIA blurs the commercial boundaries of advertising through more interactive, entertaining, and de-commercialised rhetorical strategies. Influencers also enact multiple discursive identities across rhetorical moves through the strategic use of visual semiotic resources, thereby producing different forms of emotional alignment with audiences. Finally, this form of Douyin BIA reconstructs a responsibilised, relationalised, and knowledge-based mechanism of body governance in the Chinese context, through which dominant aesthetic norms are further legitimised. Overall, this study sheds light on the discursive practices of highly commercialised mega-influencer BIA as a platformised advertising genre and contributes to understanding multimodal communication and postfeminist body governance in China.