Moralizing Everyday Consumption: The Case of Self-Care.

This article investigates the moralization of everyday consumption practices, focusing on self-care consumption in the United States. It identifies four contested, market-mediated cultural scripts of self-care—hygienic, improvement, holistic, and indulgent—each reflecting different assumptions about the self and care, influenced by competing cultural ethics such as the Protestant work ethic and the Romantic consumption ethic. Exposure to conflicting cultural scripts triggers consumers' moral introspection, leading them to set personal moral boundaries through four approaches: denouncing (moral righteousness), positioning (moral inclusivity), balancing (moral licensing), and ritualizing (moral autonomy). The study contributes to consumer research by highlighting how morality intertwines with consumer identity and practice theory, showing that moral considerations shape the symbolic meanings and enactments of everyday consumption, and that consumers actively negotiate these moral tensions in their consumption behaviors.