Part III: Bodies, risks and public environments: Selling control.

This article focuses on product advertisements in print magazines targeted at women. The texts promote their products by naturalising specific value systems and resisting others. They work, for example, to undermine what we could call the discourse of avoidance--the simple logic that if exposure to the sun is dangerous, one should avoid it, and the associated value system that sun exposure is outdated and naíve. They posit ideological dilemmas, particularly desire for hedonistic leisure while avoiding risk, to promote expensive, technologised and packaged solutions to them. These meanings are communicated for the most part implicitly, in the subtle semantics of the texts language and visual imagery. The tacit assumption in all sun-care promotional texts is that brown or golden skin has aesthetic advantages over white skin. There appears to be a reticence to use the colour vocabulary itself; golden delicious and, in the same text, all the gold without the guilt is the only reference in the sampled texts, other than tan as a colour, for example the only colour you will turn is tan. Rather, the priority is established visually, in the skin tone of female models portrayed and in the colour of product packaging. In terms of what the colours signify, gold is powerfully associated with warmth and richness, just as brown skins are associated with southern skin types and cultures.