Analysing the chemistry in beauty blogs for curriculum innovation

Abstract

Cosmetics play an important role in our everyday lives. However, the variety of different products and brands appears confusing to consumers. Products vary from basic, indispensable, everyday items such as soaps, shower gels and shampoos, to decorative cosmetics and high-end skin creams with specific, “innovative” ingredients for every skin type imaginable. In recent years, beauty blogs have become a popular platform to seek information on cosmetic products. Such blogs often contain chemistry-based content, which is only rarely written or at least double-checked by someone with a scientific background. Often such blogs reach a readership of several million users per month. But which role do chemical aspects play in beauty blog texts? This paper describes a qualitative content analysis of 60 recent posts from six popular English-language beauty blogs. The texts were coded according to categories such as the number of chemistry-related terms, supporting information for such terms, positive and negative claims regarding chemical aspects, references to studies etc. Based on the distribution of the categories, three main types of blogs could be distinguished: The “scientific type”, the “semi-scientific type” and “the non-scientific type”. By color-coding the different categories, a difference between these types can be easily depicted. The paper will discuss first findings and ideas on how to make use of corresponding analyses of beauty blogs for the teaching of chemistry.

Keywords

• multimedia
• science communication
• scientific literacy
• social media