The conflation of health and beauty in advertising: A critical multimodal discourse analysis of three television commercials

Abstract

This study applies a critical multimodal discourse analysis to three television commercials: 1) Neutrogena ‘Healthy Skin Liquid Makeup’, 2) Colgate ‘Advanced Total whitening toothpaste’ and 3) Danone ‘Activia probiotic yogurt’. In order to gain further insight into how advertising discourses can shape body image ideologies, this study sets out to investigate how television commercials construct a relationship between health and beauty. This research includes analysis of both the visual and the verbal modes, drawing on Systemic Functional Linguistics, Critical Discourse Analysis, Multimodal Discourse Analysis, and Inter-mode relations. The findings are discussed in terms o f the theories of healthism discourse and aestheticization of everyday life. In addition, Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus, lifestyle, taste, capital, and field will be used to discuss how the health-beauty consolidation is recursively produced and reproduced by society and its members. The results of this study suggest that there is a colonization o f the advertising non-health related products under healthism discourse, and this type of advertising is cooccurring with ideologies of the body beautiful resulting in an unprecedented consolidation between the concepts o f health and beauty. These findings underscore the need for media literacy and hence the importance o f practicing and also teaching discourse analysis approaches such as SFL, CDA, and MDA that are designed to expose ideological underpinnings.