Aging & Social Change: Ninth Interdisciplinary Conference

Abstract

Sweden, like most developing countries, is experiencing a rapidly ageing population. By 2030, one in five persons will be aged 65 or older. A growing body of research indicates that it is increasingly becoming important for the elderly to maintain a healthy lifestyle. This has led to the development of policies such as “successful ageing” that have become prerequisites for the future sustainability of health and social policies in Western countries. Successful ageing is a holistic approach that seeks to help individuals to optimize their physical, mental, and social health that will help them to lead a good quality of life. Considering that this particular segment of the population constitutes the largest and the most lucrative consumer market, contemporary media continuously try to incorporate this social group in their advertisement campaigns. These marketing campaigns provide models of the type of lifestyle that individuals should maintain if they want age ‘perfectly.’ Drawing on a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) perspective, I focus on how discourses of ageing are re-defined and re-positioned through L’Oreal Paris’ advertisements of their “Ageless Beauty” campaign, featuring the “Age Perfect Golden Age” and “Age Re-Perfect” range. The analysis is based on Fairclough’s three-dimensional framework. The findings indicate that discourses of ageing are being connected to desired values such as beauty, perfectionism, golden, and away from the connotations of ‘old,’ ‘elderly’ i.e., the undesired states of life as well as how discourses of beauty are constructed and reconstructed by stereotyping how their products are synonymous with a successful life.