Selling Empowerment: Feminist Narratives in Social Media Beauty Marketing

This thesis examines how empowerment is communicated through Instagram-based beauty marketing in the context of postfeminist consumer culture. The research focuses on Rare Beauty as a case study and explores how themes such as self-care, inclusivity, diversity, authenticity, and personalization are integrated into the brand’s Instagram communication. The study applies concepts from empowerment theory, postfeminism, femvertising, and platform communication studies to analyze how empowerment is reconfigured within digital media environments. The empirical material consists of Rare Beauty’s Instagram posts published during the selected research period. The research uses qualitative content analysis to examine visual representation, caption tone, message type, femvertising elements, and audience engagement metrics. The findings show that Rare Beauty combines commercial promotion with emotionally resonant and socially conscious narratives, where empowerment is primarily articulated through individualized wellbeing, emotional openness, and consumer choice rather than explicit feminist activism. The thesis demonstrates that emotionally relatable and representation-oriented content tends to generate stronger audience engagement, suggesting that authenticity and affective resonance function as important mechanisms of visibility and interaction on Instagram. The study argues that empowerment on social media operates as a platform-mediated and commercially embedded communicative process shaped by postfeminist consumer culture and digital visibility logics.