Multimodal Discourse Analysis of Beauty Practices within the Consumer Culture Perspective: A Case Study of Rednote Bloggers

Abstract

In the context of the booming consumer culture, beauty practices have gradually emerged as a key topic on social media platforms. As a typical community for sharing beauty content, Rednote offers abundant cases for researching the consumerist practices of beauty bloggers. This study aims to explore how rednote beauty bloggers implement beauty practices through multimodal discourse analysis and to reveal the underlying consumerist logic. A case study approach is adopted, which involves selecting graphic and video content from typical beauty bloggers and analyzing their discourse strategies and influencing factors by integrating visual, auditory, and textual modalities. The research findings suggest that the multimodal discourse of beauty bloggers is shaped by factors such as platform algorithm recommendations and user interaction preferences, with their content production exhibiting both strategic and adaptive characteristics. The conclusions indicate that beauty bloggers effectively shape the consumerist paradigm of beauty practices through the synergistic interplay of multiple modalities-visual presentation, linguistic expression, and interactive behavior-thereby driving user engagement and consumption decisions. This study presents a novel analytical perspective on understanding the culture of beauty consumption on social media platforms.