Women Empowered Through Grey Hair: Analysis of Self-Presentation on Instagram Profiles

When most hairstyling salons had to close at the beginning of the COVID-19 lockdown, many women stopped colouring their hair. This apparently insignificant gesture was construed as a female empowering act on social media, having an impact on their online presentation. When presenting themselves online, users strategically decide how much information they wish to disclose on their social media profiles (Atrill-Smith, The Oxford Handbook of Cyberpsychology. Oxford University Press, 2019; Fullwood, The Oxford Handbook of Cyberpsychology. Oxford University Press, 2019). These profiles thus help to construct a desirable online identity that reflects the way users would like to perceive themselves and be perceived by others (Bronstein, Information Research, 19:1–14, 2014). It appears that going grey was an integral part of the identity these women wished to reveal when presenting themselves online. The objective of the present chapter was to examine the discursive realizations of this group of women’s Instagram profiles. For that purpose, a corpus of 100 Instagram profiles in Spanish was collected and analysed from bottom-up/top-down perspectives using NVivo software. Results showed that the profiles contained multimodal self-presentations, i.e., a combination of text, hashtags (#), @mentions, hyperlinks and/or emojis. Regarding content, topics and images conveying the idea of the women’s transition towards empowerment were recurrent, helping them to construct a specific and recognizable online identity.