Politics of Gendered Beauty: Misrepresentations in Global Cosmetic Branding: Analysing the Discourses through Feminist and Social Constructivist Approaches

The politicisation of gender continues to embrace the beauty standards of India, which furthers the positionality of the stereotypes themselves. The brands that soak themselves in consumer fetishism also reveal the vicious loop of a binary understanding of gender that they often mimic and reproduce. Whose identity in this context gets represented becomes an imperative question. Therefore, we delve into a Critical Discourse Analysis of the Feminist and Social Constructivist understanding of the construction of narratives by the two popular brands, viz. Dove and L'Oreal. Whilst doing so, we also employ a holistic overview of the varied campaigns and the plausible intervention of AI. Henceforth, the consumer-producer negotiation and the constant role reversal raise significant questions in the neo-liberal and post-capitalistic era. With the intervention of varied realities, the brands thus become incapable of representing the whole, championing only a majoritarian perspective, and pushing the margins further.