Healthy Skepticism Library item: 17034

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: news

Mangan L
Before and after: an old-fashioned kind of advertising scandal
The Guardian 2010 Jan 7
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/jan/07/clean-and-clear-banned-ad

Abstract:

Johnson & Johnson has had an ad banned for being misleading. But other advertising scandals have been much more serious

Full text:

The road to hell is paved with good intentions and a light dusting of face powder. This should be the lesson learned by Johnson & Johnson this week, after an advert for their Clean & Clear acne kit was banned by the Advertising Standards Association. It found that the use of makeup on its models created a misleading impression of the product’s powers.

In the “before” shots, the kit’s users looked like normal teenagers – heaving masses of overactive sebaceous glands and eyes filled with despair. In the “after” shots, they glowed like the morning dew and complaints were received about the disparity. Johnson & Johnson said they used only powder to prevent camera flare obscuring the “fewer spots, reduced redness and much clearer skin”.

It seems almost unfair that the company has been chastised for what is, in this day and age, a fairly minimal intervention. Most recent cosmetic advertising scandals have required the addition of false parts (Cheryl Cole’s hair extensions, Penelope Cruz’s fake eyelashes) or major digital enhancement (Twiggy’s peepers in a recent ad for eye cream were made to look like sapphires the size of your fist) before they registered on the public outrage-o-meter.

Plus, the before-and-after format is so endearingly old-fashioned. It recalls the Grecian 2000 ads of yesteryear or the (alas now defunct) Innovations catalogue. It used to sell some posture-improving item and in the “before” shot the woman was indistinguishable from Quasimodo. Her hair hung lankly round her pallid face, the lighting was funereal and she wore a drab, high-necked top. But after? Why, after, the device had not only given her the deportment of an Edwardian duchess but rosy cheeks, a skin-tight top and a whole new lighting rig!

The format survives in the makeover stories in women’s weeklies and in plastic-surgery ads in the back of other magazines. But the media now prefers to present us with airbrushed images – the unacknowledged “after” shots. A standard of impossible perfection, after all, shifts more units than apparently attainable improvements will ever do.