An Analysis of Figurative Language in Facial Skincare Advertisements on Instagram
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Abstract
This research aimed to study the types and reasons for using figurative language in facial skincare product advertisements on Instagram. The data was collected from 100 advertising captions posted on Instagram of top five best-selling facial skincare brands during 2024 to 2025 based on purposive sampling. A mixed-methods approach was utilized for data analysis in this study. Quantitative method was employed to investigate the types of figurative language used in facial skincare advertisements on Instagram by using descriptive statistics. Figures of speech framework proposed by Keraf was adopted to analyze the data. Qualitative approach was conducted to describe the reasons of advertisers to employ those types of figurative language through content analysis. The findings revealed that there were 406 utterances out of 100 facial skincare advertisement captions on Instagram containing figurative language. Twenty-eight figurative language types based on Keraf’s framework were found while five additional figurative language types were discovered. The top three types of figurative language included Hyperbole (64 times, 15.96%), followed by Personification (44 times, 10.83%), and Alliteration (37, 9.11%), respectively. The top three types of figures of rhetoric were Hyperbole (64 times, 27.11%), followed by Alliteration (37 times, 15.67%), and Asyndeton (35 times, 14.83%), respectively. Moreover, the top three types of figures of analogy were Personification (44 times, 46.80%), followed by Metaphor (11 times, 11.70%), Simile and Comparison (10 times, 10.63% each), respectively. The results from content analysis revealed three categories of reasons advertisers used figurative language to present the products to their customers, namely getting attention, enhancing a product’s image, and building credibility.
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