Gendered adverts: an analysis of female and male images in contemporary perfume ads

Abstract

Nowadays, in an increasingly more evident manner, perfumes assume the role of tokens of individuality and sexual orientation of those who wear them. Magazine ads that divulge the different perfume brands foreground that characteristic, by using partially stereotypical forms of representation when it comes to their protagonists: men, women (alone, in couples or in groups). After a brief theoretical contextualization on the verbal and visual signification modes in magazine ads, the present article undertakes the analysis of a corpus constituted by perfume magazine ads of different brands, gathered during 2010 and 2011, in order to detect recurrent themes, forms of representation and motifs as to the use of female and male images that can be found in this specific type of advertising.