Women's best beautiful will never be good enough: a rethoric and semiotic analysis of four advertisements for beauty products.

Title: Women's best beautiful will never be good enough: a rethoric and semiotic analysis of four advertisements for beauty products. Because of the medias central role in peoples lives in the modern society we today live in, they have become a reference in peoples processes of making sence of their subsistences and environments. Commercial companies also want to present an as good image as possible of them towards the recipients through their marketing. Both parts can lead to a distorted picture of the real och everyday and norms and ideals easily form, for example about the correct way a woman should act and be, as the media affect which references should be made available for society. The purpose of this thesis is to examine how four advertisements for beauty products produce ideals and norms of beauty as well as construct and reconstruct femininity through the ways women are represented. The study will also contain the question about how rethoric and semiotic tools are used to strengthen the messages and sell the products. The following questions will be answered within this study: How is femininity being represented in the advertisements? How can the advertisements contribute to the creation of ideals and norms of beauty? How do the companies use rethoric and semiotic tools in the four advertisements to sell their products and/or strengthen their brands? The study will be executed with a qualitative rethoric and semiotic analysis and the theories applied to it are Mediatization theory, Envisionment theory as well as a theory about gender and femininity. The foremost results of this study has been that women are represented as constantly striving towards a better beauty to be able to also feel better about themselves, gain better self-esteem and to have more fulfilled and successful lives. The women in the advertisments were shown to usually be displeased with their appearances and unsure about themselves because of it before their use of the product. A maintained need for beauty and beautyproducts was also identified to be conveyed from the companies through the advertisements, towards the recipients. This could be understood as a way for them to strengthen the messages and create a constant need among women for their beautyproducts. These tendencies has also been identified to be factors which create beautyideals and norms for women to follow to be normalised and considered as feminine. Keywords: advertisments, communication, femininity, beauty, ideals, rethorics, semiotics, gender, receptiontheor