Looking at adverts: 15

It has become the norm to see cosmetic adverts aimed at men. These industries seem to have realised their sales will increase if they market their products to the other 50.4% of the population. It appears gender equality may come into existence with shared concern for dry skin and premature aging. Despite this development in consumer marketing, products aimed at men and women vary significantly. The Clinique for Men adverts seem simple; the commodities are not cosmetic products but tools for men. They facilitate ‘work’ and perform some sort of labour.

Robert Goldman and Andrew Miller write that labour appeared as a subject in advertising during the 2008 recession. Companies needed to sell to youth demographics but the recession had disillusioned many of those preparing to enter the employment market. Lack of career prospects and stagnant wages had turned many young people against previously popular white-collar work. Goldman and Miller say;

this crisis of motivation looks like a collective search for authenticity situated against a global financial system that accommodates artificially inflated values while marginalising and depreciating concrete sources of value, namely manual labor.

To reconnect with youthful consumers advertisers also had to reconnect with ‘authentic’ working-class labour. Adverts such as the ‘Ready to Work’ campaign by Levi heralded a return of representation of the working-class labour. ‘Ready to Work’ features Braddock, a deteriorating steel town in Pennsylvania bankrupted by high unemployment and low tax collection resulting from the economic downturn. As public services ground to a halt the inhabitants abandoned Braddock. Levi turned the town into a metaphor for the disenfranchised generation who had also been abandoned by capitalism. The adverts champion youthful individuals who returned to Braddock to work the land and bring new life to the dying town. Their labour is portrayed as backbreaking, authentic and totally opposed the white-collar work deemed responsible for the financial crisis.
It is sensible for a jean company to employ working-class signs in this manner because jeans were originally marketed as hardwearing clothes for hardworking people (cowboys etc.). But using labour signs for skin products may be a little harder to comprehend.
In 1970 Jean Baudrillard, a cultural theorist, published The Consumer Society, an analysis of consumer culture. He describes two different forms of consumption, a feminine model and a masculine model. The groups of consumers are not split along gender lines – Baudrillard is clear that masculine consumers are not necessarily male and feminine consumers are not automatically assumed to be female. He describes the masculine model of consumption as;

the model of particularity […] and choice…There is no question of letting himself go or indulging himself, his aim is to achieve distinction. Knowing how to choose and not to let one’s standards slip are equivalent to the military and puritan virtues: intransigence, decisiveness, valour…The masculine model is, then, a model of competitive or selective virtue…it confers status. (p. 96)

Contradictorily, in the feminine model consumers are;

enjoined to take pleasure themselves. It is not, in this case, selectivity and particularity but self-indulgence and narcissistic concern for one’s own welfare which are indispensable. At bottom, men are still being invited to play soldiers, and women to play dolls with themselves. (p. 96)

Today, adverts invite women and men to play dolls with themselves. But for this to be acceptable for male consumers it must be disguised as playing soldiers, or at least some sort of useful ‘work’. A feminine version of consumption is only palatable if it is masculinised. Instead of relating it to pleasure, the product is made to signify a scientific process, an investment and a form of labour. It is about precision and adding value to the body, with the added help of Swiss engineering technology.