INTRODUCTION

Beauty practices have been the subject of discussion of feminist theory and sociology since Bartky's (1990) critique of beauty standards, which, following arguments such as Dworkin's (1974), iterated that the constant subjection of women's bodies to alteration is the result of an oppressive social scrutiny (Forbes et al. 2007: 266). With the harmful nature of beauty practices ranging from the psychological (Wolf 1991) to the physical (Jeffreys 2014), cosmetic products are transgressive actors in their role of the subtle and covert oppression of women.

The nail industry focuses on the beauty capital sought out by the consumers of its products (Kang 2010). The labels that can be found on the hundreds of bottles of nail lacquer of brands such as O.P.I.®, Essie®, and Revlon® are demonstrative of the culturally well-seated popular archetypes of femininity which exist on socio-cultural grounds. The present study looks at the semantic weight of Essie’s® brand labels in particular, and the way in which a leading brand creates linguistic representations abiding by the age-old, deeply entrenched archetypes that describe the attractive woman, in turn targeting the average female consumer and her cognitive associations (Goddard and Patterson 2000; McLoughlin 2000, Bulawka 2013). The presence of such typing, which veers towards being an all-encompassing representative statement of women, also plays a role of upholding sexist gender ideologies in a semi-covert manner. This, as action, places women in a subversive role through semantic and cognitive association.

Nails, and the state they are in when on the female hand, are the object of much scrutiny in the socially impressed importance of their being well-maintained, and they constitute an equation with the socially entrenched conviction of there being such a thing as true femininity. Because long nails are a sign of manual dexterity and erotic appeal (Brownmiller 1984; Lupton 1996), the so-called art of nail painting is yet another practice which places many women at the mercy of cosmetic products. What is often overlooked in the study of the oppressive nature of the beauty industry is the linguistic aspect, and how cognitive associations constructed by discursive, textual and lexical means maintain harmful generalizations.