Shades of beauty: evolving representation in advertising

Notions of beauty for diverse consumers are shaped by societal and marketplace discourses often evident through advertisements. This chapter examines diverse representations in cosmetics advertisements across four socio-historic periods. The components of such messages include verbiage and visuals reflecting the offering and often prototypical consumers. Compared to the twentieth century, twenty-first-century representations are more likely to include diversity—from family composition or physical ability to racial identity. With brands recognizing the financial potential of a broader set of racialized consumers, brands’ advertisements may feature more diverse representation. Is it enough to include different races? Research demonstrates that even as marketers include diverse representation, those messages may still reflect racism—most often in the form of colorism, discrimination based on complexion. The chapter examines race in advertisements beyond presence or absence with an assessment of how it is represented. It considers how macro-social factors influence representations due to interactions between societal and marketplace discourses through the Transformative Advertising Research framework and propose opportunities for future research.