A semiotic study on lipstick L’oreal Paris product poster advertisement

Beauty products advertisements concern the scholars because they use the term women empowerment only to increase their profit without caring what happen to women struggle to defend their own rights in society. The third-wave feminism which more closely to define the beauty in diversity make scholars worried that this will misinterpret to prioritize male gaze rather than women empowerment. For this reason, this research aims to investigate the stereotype of women and how women empowerment were presented in L’Oreal Paris lipstick products advertised instagram. This research applies socio-pragmatic approach to semiotics because this study use social semiotics from Kress and van Leeuwen and pragmatism perspective from Peirce. The data of this research were collected from @lorealparis instagram posts which were related only on lipstick products. The data chosen purposively were collected and analyzed using four steps from Bezemer and Jewitt: collecting and logging, viewing, sampling, transcribing and analyzing. The result of this study shows that icon, index and symbol in the data represent women stereotypically as professional women, sexually powerful, and object of beauty which makes them looks equal and confidence regardless of their skin color and body size. This research also shows that @lorealparis lipstick product advertisement has empowered women to use their attractiveness as the power to conquer obstacles and injustice.


INTRODUCTION
Beauty product advertisement nowadays has reached all segmented customers because of models represented in beauty products includes women of color with various diversities with their bodies (Sobande, 2019). This kinds of advertisement is called 'femvertising' which was believed started from Dove advertisement (Akestam et al., 2017). This femvertising is believed to promote the feminist movement which has been entering the third-waves of feminism (Qiao & Wang, 2022). Besides, media such as poster in Instagram posts is used to advertise the products so that it can be known and accepted by the public (Aljoundi, 2013). The role of social media in advocating the movement has been heralded that the feminist movement gain so much attention and engagement to the public through hashtag in social media (Storer & Rodriguez, 2020).
Femveritising and feminism advocacy is important in promotion to gain the emotional bound with viewers (Moriarty et al., 2019) and to gain positive response (Qiao & Wang, 2022). The use social media to promote beauty products using femvertising has been proved effectively to the purchase intention and attitude towards the advertisement (Teng et al., 2021) and make viewers feel more engaged in the advertisement by sharing their life experiences (Duan, 2020). However, what feminist scholars are worried is that this femvertising with the third-wave of feminism emphasizing the women freedom to seek their pleasure will turn against the feminist movement to fight against women objectification as sexual object for male gaze and pleasure (D'enbeau, 2011;Qiao & Wang, 2022). Therefore, this study focuses on investigating advertisement of beauty products and the representation of female model in that advertisement.
Beauty product advertisements were investigated differently which can be classified into descriptive, interpretative and critical in nature. The terms description here is derived from the findings of the research which emphasizes how beauty products represent their products to the audience. Meanwhile, the interpretation is to address how the study is used to elaborate the representation of women and the marketing strategy in the beauty product advertisement. The critical means to address social inappropriateness (Fairclough, 2009) especially in femvertising of beauty products. The study which is included descriptive is the work of Sakinah & Hanifa (2020) shows how semiotic analysis is used to analyze beauty products advertisement of Wardah Perfect Brightening Cream by applying Pericean model. The finding of the study from Sakinah & Hanifa (2020) shows that icon, index, symbol are used to promote the bright beauty resulted from using Wardah products. This type of study is similar in descriptive way as Andina et al. (2021) which used Barthes semiotic model to show positive message delivered by L'oreal Paris video advertisement. Another study with similar nature was also conducted by Zhang (2019). In that research by applying Barthes semiotic model, Zhang, (2019) found that advertisements are used to persuade buyers to buy the product by giving promises.
The interpretative works in analyzing beauty products were conducted by Champlin et al. (2019), Emeksiz (2021), Mirani et al. (2021), andNaser (2021). By applying in-depth qualitative analysis, (Champlin et al., 2019), they found that women empowerment advertisements promote equality which challenge the social institution and to break the stereotypes. Similarly, the study by Mirani et al. (2021) found that three meanings of beauty promoted: beauty has no standard, confidence will make women happy and happiness is not only physical appearance but the feeling happiness also used to promote women empowerment. While Emeksiz (2021), by applying social semiotic approach, found that feminine stereotypes are still found in Women's Health Magazine in Cosmetic advertisement such as sexy kitten, Lolita, trendy model, classic feminine, and casual model stereotype. In addition, Naser (2021) reveal how these beauty products gain success in persuading viewers by analyzing the hyperbolic devices which take different forms visual and verbal such as adjectives, nouns, adverbs, verbs, and numbers.
The critical works of the study in beauty products femvertising were conducted by Duan (2020), Qiao & Wang (2022) and Sobande (2019). In the research conducted by Duan (2020), it addresses how femvertising is used only to promote the products or only to gain positive response from viewers without realizing the real structural problems in society which oppressed women. Similar work was also conducted by Sobande (2019) that femvertising is only marketing strategies and profit-oriented advertising not promoting social drive of feminism. Furthermore, Qiao & Wang (2022) also emphasized the critiques to femvertising which actually betrays women's freedom and equality because the representation of women in the advertisement are still depicting the stereotypes of ideal beauty.
By reviewing the previous study, this research aims to investigate what kinds of women stereotype are created by @lorealparis and how women empowerment advertisement in @lorealparis instagram posts is presented. This research took the Instagram posts from @lorealparis because L'Oreal Paris Company is the world's largest cosmetics company based on the Global Premium Cosmetics Market Report 2018-2022 (Dian, 2021). This research took socio-pragmatic approach to semiotics in investigating the data. This approach is meant to address combined terms of social semiotics of Halliday (1978) and pragmatism perspective in Peircean model (Plowright, 2016). The combination of this is used to see how the message from the posts are related to the experiencers and how the massages are represented in the posts related to the meaning making process. This combination is to complete one to another theory especially in Peircean model need the more fine grain theory offered by social semiotics proposed by (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2021). Similar combination is also conducted by Feng & O'Halloran (2013) when combining social semiotics with conceptual metaphor.
Social semiotic approach of Halliday and his colleagues was designed to observe language and other semiotic sources as the realization of social context as a part of representation (Martin & Rose, 2008). The tools of analysis applied from social semiotics is the theory proposed by Kress & van Leeuwen (2021) about how the represented participants (or female models) are interacting with viewers by their gaze directly to viewers (demand) or to make viewers scrutinize them (offer), and how their social distance to viewers whether they are in close distance (personal), medium distance (social) or far distance (impersonal). The last is about the subjectivity which includes the horizontal and vertical angle of camera movement. The first is the frontal angle (involvement) or oblique angle (detachment) and the latter is high angle (viewer power), eye level angle (equality), or lower angle (representation power). Meanwhile, the pragmatic perspective from Peirce, this study using secondness which consists of icon (the resemblance of between the representamen and object or imitation), index (the direct connection between representamen and object), and symbol (unmotivated relation between representamen and object) (Chandler, 2017).

METHOD
This study was carried out by applying the steps adapted from Bezemer and Jewitt (2010) which applies at least four steps in investigating multimodal data in instagram post @lorealparis. The first step of the method is collecting and logging data. In this step, the data was collected from @lorealparis instagram post about lipstick product from January to December 2021 which has likes from 2,000 to 21,000 likes to show the engagement to the instagram users. After being collected, the data was logged by giving comments and during observing the data such as what the post is about and how the post represents the woman in the poster. In the second step, the data were viewed to determine what theoretical framework can be taken in analyzing the data. In the third step of this method, the data sample were taken. The data sample were taken purposively or it is called judgment sampling (Kothari, 2004) because the data taken were the data which consist of model in the lipstick product post to investigate the representation of female model in that post. This step made 59 data reduced to 31. From this step, then this study continued to transcribe data in word processing software by using the snipping tools in desktop and include those data in the data analysis table by applying two theoretical frameworks: Peirce semiotic model (Chandler, 2017) and Wierzbicka color terms (Wierzbicka, 1990) and its connotation (Yu, 2014), gesture and facial expression (Feng & O'Halloran, 2012).

Secondness in Visual Sign
Visual sign is a type of signs without words, like pictures, gestures, and colors (Farida, 2020). Visual sign is something identical to advertising because through visual sign especially from poster, it is easier for consumers to know the description of the product (Farida, 2020). In addition, through posters, customers can easily understand the message that the advertiser wants to convey. Secondness found in visual sign are 2 symbols, 2 icons, and 31 indexes. The symbol colors of lipstick that researcher found in poster is 6 colors. The colors are pink, nude, red, dark red, brown, and orange. The pink color can be interpreted with joy, love, friendship, sensitivity, sexuality, and feminime. The concept of nude colors is synonymous with human skin color, is adjusted to a color that matches the skin. The red color is related to blood or fire that can be interpreted courage, strength, passion, emotion, danger, and determination and the dark red can be interpreted passion, will, anger, leadership, and courage. Brown color is mixture of yellow, black and red (Wierzbicka, 1990). Brown color has a friendly and sincere impression and a neutral color (Hawan, 2018;Yu, 2014). And last orange color, according to David Brewster, orange color is included in the tertiary colors (a combination of primary and secondary colors) that is combination red color and yellow color (Wierzbicka, 1990). The orange color has meaning fun and creativity (Hawan, 2018;Yu, 2014).
In this data, the researcher found a western posture which can be shown in Figure 1. The gesture is indicated by the hand holding the product and staring confidently. The gesture can be interpreted as a take action gesture. This gesture occurs because the character is about to take an action, as indicated by slightly raised eyebrows with a serious face that only focuses on an object that indicates readiness or seriousness (Feng & O'Halloran, 2012). The gesture is indicated by the head turned to one side, the eyes turned forward to look at the implied target of seduction, and the hand slightly lifting the collar. Peirce argued that there are three types of icon: an image, a diagram and a metaphor (Plowright, 2016). First, a piece of painting by Gustave Courbet from 1868 that now resides in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York was chosen as the background for a poster to promote lipstick products. This piece of painting is the painting "The Woman in the Waves". The picture is notable for its realistic flesh tones and traces of underarm hair. Statue characters are used to complete the poster image because the stone statues are carefully carved to form a beautiful work. The important idea about a metaphor, it is not to be understood literally (Plowright, 2016) In this data, researcher found 31 indexes in the form of posters. According to Pierce (Chandler, 2017), indexical is included direct connection, natural signs, medical symptoms, measuring instrument, signals, pointers, recordings, and personal trademarks. Poster is included in indexical recordings.

Secondness in Verbal Sign
Verbal sign are one of the types of communication involving words, phrase or sentence (Farida, 2020). Verbal sign in advertising has a big influence on selling a product because, through a verbal sign, advertisers will easily attract the attention of consumers in buying the products offered and to make customers more easily understand the purpose of the advertisement (Farida, 2020). Secondness found in verbal sign are 78 symbols, 14 hastags, and 14 icons.  -Non-drying and that doesn't feather -Shows the type of lipstick product that does not dry out the lips. From the data above, this is also reinforced by testimonials from readers (consumers). This is some testimonials from consumers: @Lulu Nashoha "I already have the one with the petal potion shade, I'm confused about how to remove it because it's so durable"; @femaledailynetwork "The lipstick lasts all day long"; @TimeToCookTriana "I've tried it on my hand when I swatched the color on the counter, then in the afternoon I took a shower and didn't pay attention to the part of my hand, until tomorrow afternoon it's still there even though I've taken a shower". Lipstick products that last long on the lips are one of the advantages of the product because customers do not need to retouch the lipstick every time. Hashtags are used to make it easier for readers to find content and share information related to the caption (Caleffi, 2015). Hashtags are not only used as a categorization method, but are specifically created by individual users to comment, praise or criticize, promote a brand or event, to spread and provide updates on the latest news, and so on (Caleffi, 2015). In this data, the hashtag is used to promote its products to make it more widespread and make it easier for readers to see the products of the brand.

Lips
Emojis are small images encoded with the same protocol as letters, numbers, and other punctuation and spelling characters (Gawne & McCulloch, 2019). The function of emoji has three main waves of understanding are emoji as language proxy, emoji as emotional indicator, and emoji as pragmatic indicator (Gawne & McCulloch, 2019).

Meaning interaction in visual sign
Meaning interaction in visual sign is meant to investigate the meaning making of visual semiotic source in the @lorealparis posts in Instagram. It shows in table 6 shows that demand is dominated in contact or gaze between represented participant (model) and interactive participant (viewers), and personal is more frequent than social and impersonal. While detachment in attitude subjectivity is the most dominant feature, equality or eye to eye level angle is also the most predominant. This dominant feature symbolize that women are depicted willing to be the center of attention closely but they do not want to be too involved because they have their own world. They also want to be treated equally among men and they are confidence with their choice.

Meaning of Words and Clauses
The empowering women in @lorealparis advertisements is also shown in form of words and clauses. The direct word using nominalization or make process into nominal group (Halliday & Matthiesen, 2014) in prepositional phrase, the 'empowerment' in 'for women empowerment' and dynamic forces empower in the clause empower yourself show that the advertisement of @lorealparis aims to make women more confident and empowered. From the bullet format to its satin finish 1 … vibrant colors that will make you feel unstoppable 2 wherever you go 3 1. prepositional phrase 2. adjective 3. secondary clause: elaboration 8.
Empower yourself for this wedding season Non-finite verb The other word such as adjective in 'unstoppable' and classifier in 'bullet format' and 'power suit' represent women in strength though in other representation, finite verb 'love', classifier 'satin' still shows the women softness.

Discussion
The Representation of Female Model in @lorealparis lipstick product poster shows that visually they are dominated by professional stereotype which emphasize on their job roles in society. This is shown that women stereotypes started to change from merely sexual object to be more professional in appearance. Women represented as professional job roles are positioned in public background instead of at home or domestic settings (Mager & Helgeson, 2011). This women stereotype category were discussed in detail in Middleton et al. (2019) which divided the stereotype into 6 categories but in the selected post from @lorealparis, there are only four categories found.
These four categories found in @lorealparis were measured by observing the attire worn by the models, part of body shown by them, facial expression and gesture, settings and the verbal semiotic source in the posts. In addition, female models which are endorsed the products are not only dominated by the white Anglo Saxon but women of color is also represented equally. From the poster image, the model in figure 4a wears simple clothes with a glamorous style and elegant make-up, it can be seen from the clothes that cover her neck (Middleton et al., 2019). This is clarified by the words "Infaillible 2 Step 24H Lipstick", "the most vibrant non-transparent", "up to 24H" and the use of the hashtag "#MaskFriendly" which indicates that the lipstick is suitable for those who have work outside in the current pandemic era. This caption is also clarified by the consumer from the comment like @femaledailynetwork "The lipstick lasts all day long", @serenita_colori "I love these shade of liquid lipstick perfect also under the mask", and @TimeToCookTriana "I've tried it on my hand when I swatched the color on the counter, then in the afternoon I took a shower and didn't pay attention to the part of my hand, until tomorrow afternoon it's still there even though I've taken a shower". Therefore, this model can be represents professional woman because she wears unrevealing clothed which can be perceived to be more intelligent (Ward, 2016).
The model wears modest clothing without showing part of chest or cleavage and part of abdomen which is considered sexualized (Ward, 2016). Therefore, this model could be said that she represents professional woman and this was also explained by the sentence "our International Spokesperson @jaha_marie" from the caption indicating that the model is a national spokesperson. Therefore, it can be said that both figure 4a and 4b represents women in public sphere. Even though, the setting of figure 4a and 4b indexed that they were in public sphere though it is in less detail for both of them (Kress & (Caple, 2013). Their facial expression and gesture also shown that they are confidence with their upright body movement (Feng & O'Halloran, 2012).

Sexually Powerful
From the poster image in figure 5a-c, the models were represented as sexually powerful woman marked by a gesture of face that indicate with the eyes turned forward to look at the viewers or demand (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2021) to show the sense of seduction with flirting gesture such as touching lips and showing her part of body with open neckline clothing (Middleton et al., 2019) and upright body movement showing their confidence (Feng & O'Halloran, 2012). The figure 5a is clarified again with the phrase "the curvatures cushions your lips with luxurious color", the word luxurious is the result of using lipstick that can attract someone's attention. The color attracts attention which is further clarified by the comments @haiguangchen2020 said "I can't choosed cos of any color so beautiful and glamorous" and @theematapa said "I don't regret. Loreal is making wonders for me". Figure 5a also shows the body diversity which have confidence effect to the consumers (Rodgers et al., 2019) because model 5a broke the myth of beauty that must be white, slim, and long straight hair (Alomia & Arbaiza, 2021). Model in figure 5b can be seen worn more open necklines clothing by revealing the part of chest on the right side and she looks so proud with her attractiveness (Middleton et al., 2019) and the color of the lipstick is dark red which also means beauty in positive connotation (Yu, 2014). Therefore, this model with her slimness, whiteness and youth can represent an attractiveness which may make insecurity to others (Alomia & Arbaiza, 2021). It was clarified again with the sentence "Express that special inner something that only you possess" in the caption related to gestures of body showing her part of body with upright body movement and confidence facial expression (Feng & O'Halloran, 2012).
Model in figure 5c also shows sexually powerful woman marked by the clothes worn slightly open on the right shoulder (Middleton et al., 2019) and the color of the clothes and lipstick is pink and reddish pink which both of them are closely related (Wierzbicka, 1990). The color she put on her lips and the color of her clothes symbolize the color of beauty (Yu, 2014). Public sphere as a background shows that perception of woman changes from domestic to public setting (Mager & Helgeson, 2011) captions that support "Luma walks with confidence through the city" and "lasts all day". This is clarified by the people comment @Lulu Nashoha "I already have the one with the petal potion shade, I'm confused about how to remove it because it's so durable"; @femaledailynetwork "The lipstick lasts all day long"; and @TimeToCookTriana "I've tried it on my hand when I swatched the color on the counter, then in the afternoon I took a shower and didn't pay attention to the part of my hand, until tomorrow afternoon it's still there even though I've taken a shower".

Object of Beauty
From the poster image, the model in 5a and 5b shows object of beauty because the posters indexed the European women with blonde hair, pale skin, and blue eyes (Middleton et al., 2019). The focus of these posters is the lips of the models since the vector or hand emanates the action to the lips with demand look to the viewers (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2021). The lipstick colors chosen to be used by the model are dark red and pink which are closely related (Wierzbicka, 1990), which means that the color represent beauty (Hawan, 2018;Yu, 2014). . The gesture of taking from the model is to look straight ahead with confidence, depicting the confidence of a brave woman (Feng & O'Halloran, 2012) can be shown a professional woman. This is also clarified by the words in the caption such as flawless, infaillible 24H Lipstick, stays on your lips, transfer-proof, and mask friendly. a b Figure 6. The object of beauty representation on women (Source: Social Media @lorealparis)

Third-wave Feminism Movement Representation
The representation of female models and their interaction to viewers especially related to their gaze shows that they want to be seen as equal. Black women and women of colors as the model of the lipstick products shows that the diversity of beauty representation has echoed the feminist movement message (Lazar, 2007) because female models represented in @lorealparis no longer glorify ideal beauty which only take particular race to rise, White Beauty. This representation also advocate what women should do in the third-wave feminism: self-expressiveness by embracing their sexuality and femininity (Qiao & Wang, 2022) without revealing their part of body in excessive ways such as showing part of chests which make them look unintelligent and socially incompetent (Ward, 2016).
Third-wave feminism is also symbolized by the use of word that represents women strength and power but still can show their sensuality. Sensuality and knowledge of beautifying themselves as part of power (Lazar, 2007) make this representation is in line with clothing, wearing leather jacket which in the past it was only worn by men to represent toughness (Mills, 2005). In addition, their representation in meaning interaction which is dominated by equality in table 6, make them looks more diverse in the concept of beauty. The independence look and attractiveness as career women is the value of third-wave feminism which L'Oreal Paris cherish (Qiao & Wang, 2022) which make them no longer in position of three pressure of woman: perfect in all three field, work, kitchen and bed (Qiao & Wang, 2022) because the representation of women as mother which is similar to the findings from (Champlin et al., 2019) were not found in the data.

CONCLUSSION
In previous studies, the representation of women was more aimed at the representation of beauty by emphasizing the ideal beauty, i.e. white skin, slim, and a radiant face (Mager & Helgeson, 2011;Nuraryo, 2019). These features, however, can make viewers feel pressured and insecure (Alomia & Arbaiza, 2021). L'Oreal Paris is found to focus in empowering women proved by all representation which breaks the stereotype that women are sexually objectification but they show that women are using their attractiveness as the power to serve their own right (Lazar, 2007).
The data also shows that using socio-pragmatic approach to semiotics make the analysis of the sign more detail because secondness in Peircean model: icon, index, and symbol can be investigated in more fine-grained explanation. The use of interpretant to clarify the position of viewers toward the posts that they are responding positively by seeing that beauty is the way to gain power. Social semiotics theory of gesture and facial expression (Feng & O'Halloran, 2012) and horizontal and vertical angle of the camera (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2021) help the analysis of indexical sign in Peircean terms.
Women in this research are represented into two from three stereotypes according Alomia & Arbaiza (2021): attractive and professional career women ousted women as housewives and at home (Champlin et al., 2019) and from Middleton et al. (2019)'s perspective, this research found that women in @lorealparis posts are shown to be represented into sexually powerful women, object of beauty and professional women rather than as sexual objectification for male gaze. This research also support the findings of (Mager & Helgeson, 2011) that women stereotypes and representation has changed when they are more frequently represented as attractive and professional women.
The limitation of this research is that it only focuses on the representation of women's models in terms of the stereotypes through the signs that appear in advertising posters supported by captions, facial features and gestures and colors. Thus, suggestions for further research can increase the focus on women's representation in more cosmetic products to see how the changes happen from time to time.