Maia Purcell

A close-up headshot of a young Black woman with warm brown skin and bright eyes, smiling widely with glossy lips. She has long black box braids, wears silver chunky hoop earrings, and a silver necklace with an oval blue sapphire pendant. Her attire is a black top, and the background is a softly blurred modern building.

Maia Purcell is a communications professional with experience in marketing, digital content strategy, and institutional communications. Her work spans higher education, healthcare, and community organizations, where she develops clear, audience-focused messaging across platforms. Maia is particularly interested in strategic storytelling, audience engagement, and how organizations translate complex ideas into accessible content. She is passionate about communications that strengthen public understanding, build meaningful connections, and support impactful initiatives.

This study examines how self-care is constructed within TikTok influencer marketing and how these representations shape its contemporary understandings. Using qualitative content analysis, 30 posts from influencers with over 100,000 followers were analyzed across themes including product promotion, beauty maintenance, emotional wellbeing language, individualized responsibility, and gendered targeting. The findings show that 83% of posts centre on beauty and consumption, often usingĀ  language to frame purchasing as a response to stress and burnout. This framing positions self-care as an individual responsibility while masking the broader structural conditions that create the need for it in the first place. The study concludes that influencer marketing narrows the meaning of self-care into a consumptive practice, marginalizing simple, relational and collective, forms of self-care.

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A close-up portrait of a young woman with warm brown skin, long dark hair, and dark eyes, looking towards the viewer with a subtle smile. She has a small gold nose ring and a Vivienne Westwood Orb stud earring, wearing a black boat-neck top, with a softly blurred indoor background.
A 'No Image Available' placeholder image with a bold, black serif capital 'S' centrally located. The background is an off-white, overlaid with three blurred abstract shapes: a light blue rectangle in the top center, a yellow circle in the bottom left, and a burgundy triangle in the bottom right. The text 'No Image Available' is displayed in black sans-serif font at the bottom of the image, all enclosed within a thin black border.
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