Parasocial Paternalism and Embodied Advice: How Beauty Interventions are Marketed on TikTok

• In Event: 30280 - Consuming Authenticity: Blurring Distinctions across Work and Play

Abstract

Occupational credentials connect to broader power relations, provide authority used to justify appearance-based inequalities, and are linked to the social contexts implicated in beauty interventions. Plastic surgeons, cosmetic dentists, and other medical professionals offering cosmetic procedures advertise to global audiences on digital platforms, where they compete with less prestigiously credentialed counterparts offering their own beauty interventions. How do online content creators promoting beauty interventions portray themselves and the interventions they offer to audiences? How do audiences respond? How might these portrayals differ across creators’ occupational credentials and other identity characteristics? To answer these questions, we apply thematic qualitative and categorical content analysis to TikTok videos produced by creators promoting beauty interventions alongside comments responding to these videos. We find men with higher-status occupational credentials in our corpus frequently practice parasocial paternalism, portraying themselves as affable and approachable while still centering themselves and other men in the beauty intervention processes of their primarily women clientele. Conversely, women across credential hierarchies employ embodied advice, pursuing showcased interventions themselves rather than solely advertising them. Our findings illustrate conflicting, interlinked empowerment and subjugation in online content showcasing beauty interventions, revealing how social media add an additional dimension to this complex relationship.

Authors

• Katherine Furl, University of North Dakota

• Addison Lewis, Cardozo School of Law

• Hinal Patel, Wake Forest University

• Siya Patel, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill