Gender portrayals in advertising: how body hair shapes consumer disgust and purchase intentions

Advertising occasionally features body-hair norm violations: women or men models with visible body hair that departs from prevailing ad depictions. Framing disgust as a boundary-regulating emotion triggered by violations of socially maintained appearance norms, two studies examined how such portrayals shape affect and persuasion across gendered bodies. Participants viewed ads featuring hairy versus hairless women and men models, and disgust was assessed through self-report and facial-expression analysis (FEA). Across studies, ads featuring women with visible body hair elicited stronger self-reported disgust than analogous portrayals of men, whereas FEA-based disgust did not differ across conditions. Self-reported disgust, in turn, predicted lower purchase intention for both women and men models, with a significantly stronger indirect effect for women models. The research advances an asymmetric norm-rigidity account of body-hair portrayals, identifying self-reported disgust as the mechanism through which body-hair norm violations carry greater persuasive costs for women models than for men models.