Abstract
This article examines current nuances of the “beauty myth” by analyzing a series of advertisements for antiaging products aimed at women in their 40s and 50s. These advertisements feature popular aging celebrities, Andie MacDowell and Diane Keaton, who assume a supposedly “authentic” voice within the advertisements. We argue that this “code of authenticity” operates within the visual and textual constraints of beauty advertising which undermine the potentially liberating message of authenticity, which, according to Taylor (1991), can be understood as discovering and defining one's true self. While advertisers have shifted ground by hiring aging celebrities, celebrities over 40, the advertisers also appropriate messages of power feminism or what Foss and Foss (2009) refer to as “repowered feminism,” and through “strategic juxtaposition,” continue to reinforce enduring codes of beauty such as the necessity of appearing youthful, thin, able-bodied, White, and middle class.
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