Skin as a Canvas: The Origins of Facial Disfigurement

This chapter contextualises the representation of skin in Victorian newspapers within the rising skincare products and advertising industries at the end of the century. It will demonstrate how the linguistic and visual depictions of skin as a surface symptomatic of sociocultural meanings could serve commercial purposes, consolidating normative notions of embodied moral ideals. The case studies analysed will show how disfigurement was rhetorically represented as an ideological construct aimed at associating disfigurement with ideas of shame and punishment. The sociological roots of this construction lie in the commercial premises upon which the print press developed in the nineteenth and subsequent centuries. I contend that the two main stylistic schemes deployed to advertise skincare products—dichotomies and series—created and reinforced conventional portrayals of skin appearance. The repetition of these representational tropes for advertising purposes contributed to establishing frameworks still utilised today in the promotion of standard beauty ideals by modern mass media.