Sensuous Women In Advertising

By far, the most popular and common motif displayed within perfume advertising is that of a female model. Although it can be argued that there are more perfumes and fragrances for women, amongst most brands, and therefore more adverts for female perfumes in general, the image of woman is exploited in perfume advertising, with female nakedness becoming increasingly more common, significantly more than the image of men. ‘The typical image of the sensuous women enticingly or definitely addressing the viewer continues to be repeatedly employed in contemporary advertising, assuming the form of an ‘agent provocateur’, whose main function in ads is that of eliciting the desired emotional response in the viewer’. With the rapid development of new
However, more often than not, today, it is not the scent of the perfume itself that the women are buying, but the fantasied illusion that they will become the ultimate sex symbol portrayed in the advertisements and attract the attention of a possible lover with the aroma of lust. While this campaign approach is successful in increasing sales within the industry, as demonstrated above, it certainty does not help to promote a healthy image of an independent woman, empowered by her own means without the desire for a male’s assurance of her sexual status, amongst a young audience but instead, increases the pressures of the female society to become adversely sexualised. By displaying images of intoxicatingly beautiful women, heavily made up with an expression of desire and posing in sensual positions to expose their feminine features, it raises the question as to whether the marketing campaign for perfume products has gone beyond the point of enticement but in fact reached the stage of