See P&G pulls Taylor Swift Cover Girl mascara ad and UK’s Advertising Standards Authority bans misleading cosmetics ads for more on the issue about manipulating images for beauty advertising.
P&G (Cover Girl) has been more honest than L’Oreal (which also owns Maybelline) about enhancing images for its ads: for example, in its LashBlast mascara ads featuring Drew Barrymore, it provides fine print that lash inserts were applied before mascara.
Now comes news that P&G has pulled its ad featuring Taylor Swift for its NatureLuxe Mousse Mascara, after the US Council of Better Business Bureau’s National Advertising Division requested that P&G substantiate its claims and called into account P&G’s enhancing the image to mislead the consumer about how much the mascara enhances the eyes:
The issue of Photoshopping images has been a hot topic on online fashion and beauty forums. Are we ready for more realistic advertising? We claim we are, but as ExtremeTech notes,
“… humans are incredibly sensitive to visual stimuli — and multiple trillion-dollar industries, including advertising, cosmetics, movies, and TV, all stand to gain by making their products look more appealing. There is a reason that digital manipulation and post production is so prevalent, after all — and indeed, it could even be argued that non-manipulated images now look ugly to our eyes.”
The UK’s Advertising Standards Authority banned an excessively retouched ad featuring Julia Roberts for Lancome and this one featuring Christy Turlington for Maybelline:
At right, a fresh-faced Turlington dares to bare.
The ASA deemed these ads misleading, as the perfect complexions were a result of photo manipulation, not product use. Watch this space for US crackdown on misleading cosmetics advertising.
The New York Times had a feature on Bare Escentuals’ much ballyhooed “Be a Force of Beauty” advertising campaign: Beauty Might Not Be Blind, but the Casting Call Was.
According to the NYT:
To find models that represented the elusive notion of beauty, the company held a blind casting call for women ages 20 to 60. Representatives from Bare Escentuals did not see the women who applied until they were selected for the campaign. Instead, they asked more than 270 women to complete a questionnaire about who they were and what they were like.
“My agent wouldn’t even tell me who the company was,” said Keri Shahidi, 42, one of the women chosen for the campaign, because the agent did not want the knowledge to affect her answers. The list was then whittled to 78 women, who were chosen based on their answers to the survey and brought in for interviews with casting agents. That list was reduced to 26 women, and after an a additional round of interviews, five women made the final cut.
Not seeing the women before they were chosen, Ms. Blodgett said, was a bit nerve-racking. “Do you know what a huge risk that is? What if all five of them were blonde, blue-eyed and 30?”
The follow-up trailers suggest that the casting agents screened the women by answers to questionnaires and audio interviews alone – sight unseen. I have a hard time believing that these attractive women were selected through answers to questionnaires and audio interviews alone.
Cold Cream 'n' Roses 