Communication through Images

Magazine advertisements for female cosmetics are widespread multimodal advertising texts that communicate with the target audience mostly through images. This paper approaches images in cosmetics advertising from the perspective of visual grammar introduced by Kress and van Leeuwen ([1996] 2006) and reveals how this mode is used purposefully to encode certain desired messages (state of affairs, events and/or processes, aspects of social relations, etc.) for the addressee, on the one hand, and whether the latter can properly decode such messages, on the other hand.