P&G pulls Taylor Swift Cover Girl mascara ad

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.”

UK’s Advertising Standards Authority bans misleading cosmetics ads

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.