Beauty market on Instagram: identifying widespread beliefs about the body in the beauty market through economic Sociology

• Grant number: 22/01736-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: June 01, 2022
• End date: December 31, 2023
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Sociology - Other specific Sociologies
• Principal Investigator: Maria Aparecida Chaves Jardim
• Grantee: Natalia Souza de Lala
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Ciências e Letras (FCL). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de Araraquara. Araraquara , SP, Brazil

Abstract

The present project aims to deepen the study agenda of Economic Sociology in the face of a topic that has not been much discussed, the construction of markets in social networks. In their studies, Campos, Faria, and Sartori (2019) observe that there has been a rise of virtual celebrities within Instagram, called digital influencers and many of them have become advertising agents for the beauty market. In order to stimulate the consumption of aesthetic procedures in the cosmetic market, we argue that they end up acting in the propagation of beliefs about bodily behaviors to their followers. We intend to objectify the beliefs (doxas) attributed to the body (body hexis) by the advertising of Instagram digital influencers linked to the beauty market, using Pierre Bourdieu's Reflexive Sociology. A virtual ethnography will be carried out, collecting content published on Instagram by five digital influencers, selecting the following relevance criteria in the medium (number of followers), later, this empirical corpus will be organized through content analysis (BARDIN, 1997).(AU)