The last decades, people started to affirm more and more their ethnic origins and to expect from companies to develop and to sell products adapted to their culture or to their specific needs. This new business opportunity was noticed by marketers and as a result they started to develop new marketing techniques such as ethnic marketing whose aim is to target a specific ethnic group using for instance ethnic advertising.

A content analysis was conducted to analyse the advertisements for cosmetic products presented inside nine US women magazines (Cosmopolitan, Elle and Glamour). The aim was not to interpret the ads but to study the representativeness of each ethnic group and especially the ethnic minorities in the United States by looking at the models used and by filling the tables according to the key variables of studies.

The analysis of empirical data shows that the ad frequency of each ethnic group in the selected magazines was proportional to their real percentage in the US population’s census confirming the existence of visible “ethnic minorities”.

Differences of representativeness between ethnicities were revealed by our findings. For instance, the Afro-American and Hispanics were represented by models in the ads whereas other ethnic minorities such as Pacific Islanders didn’t appear at all. Therefore we can conclude that even if there are ethnic minorities’ models in cosmetics ads, a statistic equality of representation is still waiting.