“For Skin That's Us, Authentically Us”: Celebrity, Empowerment, and the Allure of Antiaging Advertisements

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.

Keywords:

• antiaging advertising
• authenticity
• beauty myth
• celebrity culture
• feminist empowerment
• re-powered feminism
• strategic juxtaposition

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers of the manuscript for their insightful and encouraging comments and suggestions. We would also like to thank Val Fabj, the editor of Women's Studies in Communication, for her clear distillation of the reviewers' comments and for all her help in bringing this article to publication. We would also like to thank the Women's and Gender Studies program at Iowa State University for providing the forum where Chrisy first presented her ideas about the L'Oréal campaign and where Maggie and Chrisy first initiated their coauthorship of this article. Maggie would also like to thank her writing group, Patti Wojahn and Jane Detweiler, for their helpful comments and support.

Notes

Dove's white paper concluded that women over 40 want to see older models advertising the products sold to their demographic (see Butler, Etcoff, Orbach, & D'Agostino, 2006).

We consider middle age, for the purpose of this article, to be age 45 to 64, which is the age span demarcated in the book Life in the Middle: Psychological and Social Development in Middle Age, edited by Sherry L. Willis and James D. Reid (1999).

The L'Oréal website has a detailed explanation of the mission of the company and its choice of celebrity voices to represent its various product lines. Further, these celebrities are often filmed giving voice to why they appreciate the opportunity to represent L'Oréal as a company. See http://www.lorealparisusa.com/en/About-Loreal-Paris/Overview.asp.

For example, in an ad for the Elizabeth Arden line of antiaging products advertised in the November 2009 issue of More magazine, the model holds a fencing mask over her face to represent how the product protects the user from the ravages of the environment while engaged in the “beauty battlefield.”

See the Diane Keaton interview on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQPylEMyrGU. She is on the set of the commercials analyzed later in this article.

See the page on the L'Oréal web site at http://www.lorealparisusa.com.

See the ad on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5HH7nHoZjw/.

L'Oréal Age Perfect ad at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCxM0U-dcLA&NR=1.

It is interesting that calcium becomes a signifier for both youthful growth and development and staving off one of the physical manifestations of growing older.