Abstract
Scents traditionally elude clear verbal description, yet perfumes are nowadays frequently sold online, with no direct olfactory experience of the consumer at the point of purchase. The products are thus often represented by metaphorical means, depicting a desirable experience or portraying attractive identities of wearers, including stereotypical images of men and women.
This article analyzes eighty e-shop perfume descriptions, a genre which serves as an important persuasive tool in online perfume advertising. Equally divided among fragrance adverts targeted to males and females, the sample texts were collected randomly from British and American e-shops, with the primary research objective to determine how male and female identities are reflected in these descriptions.
The method of discourse analysis was applied and the AntConc 3.4.4 toolkit was used to calculate the frequency of words and their collocations. It was found that current female perfume descriptions on e-shops generally suppress gender stereotypes quite successfully, while gender stereotyping is more prominent in male perfume descriptions.