Flawless Skin, Flawless Performance: The Commodification of Turkish National Volleyball Player Saliha Şahin in the Bioderma-Sebium Advertisement

This study conducts a critical feminist analysis of Bioderma’s acne advertisement featuring Turkish national volleyball player Saliha Şahin, situated within the context of femvertising. The research aims to unveil how a female athlete’s body and success are commodified through the advertisement’s narrative of ‘flawless skin, flawless performance’. Employing a Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis methodology, the study deciphers the constructed causal relationship between athletic performance and skin condition within the ad. The analysis reveals a core finding: a significant exaggeration positing that ‘flawless’ skin is a prerequisite for ‘flawless’ performance. This narrative markets ‘flawed skin’ as a form of vulnerability and a performance-diminishing factor, ultimately reducing the solution to the consumption of a cream. The discussion unfolds along three primary axes: Under the theme of postfeminist discourse and the construction of a deficit approach, the study examines how the emphasis on individual consumption obscures structural problems. Within the section on sport, gender, and the rhetoric of ‘improvement’, it investigates how volleyball is instrumentalized as a gendered domain. The segment on commodification and the reification of feminist values demonstrates how the demands of feminism are hollowed out through their assimilation into consumer culture. Furthermore, within the Turkish context, the analysis highlights how the ‘modern’ and ‘powerful’ image of female volleyball players is commodified in this process. In conclusion, this study argues that femvertising does not promise genuine social transformation. On the contrary, it reinforces capitalist patriarchy by entrapping female athletes in a new cycle of vulnerability through the myth of ‘flawlessness’.