Naturally the desire of advertising, of advertisers, is to get you, the consumer, to consume their product. Online news sites work to give you information you'll appreciate having. If you don't keep it real, you can be shut down.
Such was the case with an ad by L'Oreal in the U.K. The cosmetics giant made a print ad so unreal by excessively airbrushing Pretty Woman star Julia Roberts' face that, as the Guardian reported on July 27 2011, the ad was banned for being deceptive. It wasn't the only L'Oreal ad to get the ax by the U.K.'s Advertising Standards Authority, one featuring supermodel Christy Turlington met the same fate.
Serious Side to Airbrushed Julia Roberts Ad
The initial complaint to the ASA was made by Scottish Liberal-Democrat MP Jo Swinson, who noted the ads were "not representative of the results the products could achieve." Swinson felt the adverts did not leave women with a true picture of what the product might do. She says it's not simply about deceptive adverts but also about what the accumulated weight of seeing so many doctored and unreal images does to people.
"There is a much more serious side to this issue as well," she told BBC TV. "We're in a situation where 1 in 4 people in the U.K. say they feel depressed about their body. Half of young women between 16 and 21 say they would consider cosmetic surgery and we've seen eating disorders more than double in the last 15 years.
"There's a problem out there with body image and confidence. The way excessive retouching has become pervasive in our society is contributing to that problem." She also said L'Oreal, and other companies, were engaged in "...using post-production techniques in a very misleading way."
Advertising Standards Authority
According to the Advertising Standards Authority website, "The ASA is the UK's independent regulator of advertising across all media, including marketing on websites. We work to ensure ads are legal, decent, honest and truthful by applying the Advertising Codes."
In other words, they work to keep the advertisers honest, in this case banning L'Oreal from using the ads. They agreed with Swinson that L'Oreal showed faces that were not real, that were airbrushed - L'Oreal declined to show them the originals - and otherwise doctored to look perfect, beyond what Roberts and Turlington really look like.
For their part, L'Oreal defended their photos but did admit they were "digitally retouched to lighten the skin, clean up makeup, reduce dark shadows and shading around the eyes, smooth the lips and darken the eyebrows." However, they said, those were the only changes they made.
That, it turns out, was too much.
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