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taken from an ad for Estée Lauder lipstick: “Tempt your lips with colour and shine like never before. Two new formulas, two new ways to do something wonderful for your lips.” As the two instantiations illustrate, it is women who are supposed to perform the corresponding actions, namely, tempting the lips and doing something wonderful for them, while the lips lack agency completely. Personification of the body parts can be easily inferred here as well, as the two verbs above denote actions that people do to or for other fellow people. Again, this kind of advertising context places women and hu/wo-manized body parts face to face.

Another more complex case in point is an ad for Andrew Collinge hair products, which reads:

“As with men, a little teasing goes a long way. Have a better relationship with your hair.” If the second war scenario discussed above portrays women and body parts as opponents, this advertisement presents a reverse situation in which a woman and her hair are in a relation of social affinity. More precisely, the hair is portrayed as a lover. Of course, the meaning focus of teasing is not on the act of detangling the hair, but on harassing it in a lighthearted manner (i.e. with the help of the product). Moreover, due to the reference to men, teasing also implies (playful) sexual harassment, which is supposed to improve the romantic relationship between the woman, who “starts the play”, and her hair.

There are, however, also advertisements which involve a slightly different personification technique, i.e. endowing products with agency. In other words, in this case it is the product that does something to or for the personified body parts. The focus of personification in most such cases is on the delicacy and frailty of the body parts.

Personifications of this kind are very similar to the examples of the type “product helps body part fight …” discussed above, in relation to the war-metaphor in advertising. Some examples are: L’Oreal lipstick “cocoons lips in a caring formula,” Clearasil face wash “is gentle to the skin,” Pantene shampoo “protects and nourishes colour-treated hair.” Such instantiations abound in the language of advertising, implicitly personifying the body parts as delicate, even child-like human beings in constant need for protection (the noun protection itself occurs very often as well). The adjective caring emphasises not only the idea of assistance and help, but also that of affection. The verb to pamper is commonly used as an implicit way of personifying the body as someone dear, treated with affectionate indulgence or even spoiled: Palmer’s body butter “will pamper your skin,” while Olay moisturiser “seriously pampers your skin, making your skin feel a million dollars.” We have also found two adverbs used to the same end, but such instances are rather rare: “For kissably and smoochably irresistibly soft hair” in an ad for Head and Shoulders shampoo (the metaphor is expressed visually as well through the close-up of a sunken mark on the model’s hair as if left by a kiss). Moreover, the abbreviation TLC (modified by the adjective soothing, which reinforces its meaning) in the Aussi ad discussed earlier in the paper suggests that the hair is a delicate person that requires considerate care and affection just like any human being.

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often go unnoticed (e.g. healthy, young, to fight, to love, to recover, to nourish, etc.), to highly creative, i.e. coined by copywriters for obvious rhetorical purposes, which seem exclusive to advertising discourse (e.g. kinky, to have a good day at the office, to be off to the spa, to thirst for, to need a straight jacket, etc.). Needles to say, the latter considerably outnumber the former due to their humorous effect, which makes potential consumers warm towards ads and promoted products (cf. Brierley 2002). Moreover, when portrayed as human beings, female body parts apparently have a life cycle of their own, as well as all sorts of human traits, attributes, abilities and needs. As such, personification also serves another, this time less obvious, rhetorical function of raising the lesser value and importance of a part (i.e.

female body part) to the greater value and importance of the whole (i.e. human being/woman). By placing a metaphorical equality sign between body parts and human beings, advertising attempts to establish a social relationship between women and body parts, and thus encourages women to treat their body with the same respect and care they treat people. However well disguised in metaphor, the ideology of advertising becomes rather transparent: it is products, not feelings, that women are advised to invest in their “fellow-body parts.”

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Annamaria Kilyeni

“Politehnica” University of Timişoara, Romania annakil78@yahoo.com