Beauty Beyond Gender: A Multimodal Analysis of Gender Inclusivity in Sephora's Campaigns

Beauty practices and cosmetic consumption have historically been associated with femininity, with beauty advertising frequently representing women through stereotypical roles, behaviours and characteristics (Goffman, 1976; Del Saz-Rubio, 2018). However, the increasing visibility of gender diversity in contemporary society has encouraged beauty brands to adopt more inclusive approaches to gender representation (Iglesias-Sánchez et al., 2023, Sánchez-Labella Martín et al., 2024; Iyer and Dani, 2025). The present thesis analyses how gender inclusivity is constructed in the advertising of Sephora, one of the world’s leading beauty retailers. The study seeks to analyse how both binary and non-binary gender identities are represented and to identify the strategies employed by Sephora to communicate its commitment to gender inclusivity. The analysis adopts a multimodal methodological framework based on the visual grammar theorised by Kress and van Leeuwen (2020) and focuses on a dataset of three Sephora advertising campaigns selected for their explicit reference to gender diversity and inclusivity. The findings of this thesis show that Sephora accurately employs inclusive representational and linguistic strategies that broaden the range of gender identities represented and contribute to an understanding of how gender inclusivity is communicated in beauty advertising.