Unethical Practices in the Beauty Industry
Image credit: @josephhadeedmd
Many beauty brands and aesthetic treatments us photoshopped before and after images to sell their products and services.
They’re lying to you, and I can’t be quiet about it anymore. They are preying on your insecurities and your belief that a miracle in a bottle exists. I’m sorry, it doesn’t. You can’t have “tighter looking skin in one step”, you can’t “iron away fat in fifteen minutes a day” with a handheld home device, there is no cream that fixes cellulite or stretchmarks and there is absolutely no way that a jar of cheap white stuff that smells nice and costs the same as a small car is going to give you a face or neck lift or cure your acne in a week. It just can’t.
Frankly, they clearly have no idea about how the face ages, skin changes or how intelligent we are as consumers. Either that, or they have no ethics. Oh wait, I think it’s both.
“My forehead wrinkles disappeared” chirps one twenty-something old fan of collagen gummies. If you keep you face still when you look in the mirror and you are under thirty-five, your wrinkles are what we call “dynamic” that is, they bounce back to smooth skin. Look, no wrinkles….what a miracle NOT. If you’re going to sell me something to improve my wrinkles.. puh-lease, show me another woman who is in the same age group (over 55) and that I can relate to and who isn’t airbrushed to within an inch of her life.
In an era where teenagers’ mental health is being damaged by the overuse of social media (see The Prince’s Trust study on Gen Z), lies about beauty, desirability and false promises is immoral at the least, and life-threatening at the most. Devastatingly, The Prince’s Trust report says that as many as one in three girls report that they are unhappy with their personal appearance by the age of fourteen. Lift your game beauty industry, tell the truth and empower young women.
I saw an Instagram post this weekend where there was a grid of nine women who all looked exactly like the gorgeous Mila Kunis. Only three of them were her. The rest were either surgically enhanced, crafted with dermal filler or filtered to look like her. Where has the celebration of our uniqueness gone and why do we want to look like somebody else? As author and Nurse Practitioner Anita East so succinctly puts it in her book Beautiful Unique Faces, that in the pursuit of perfectionism, not only can we lose sight of our unique beauty, but also put our health and potentially, our lives, in danger. As a highly experienced aesthetic nurse, Anita has seen the heartbreaking mental health struggles from trying to reach the impossible goal of looking perfect.
We are seeing before and after photos that are filtered, face tuned, and photoshopped, where makeup is worn in the after shot, where the quality of photo and lighting are dodgy to say the least and my all-time favourite….the stolen before and after. A company advertising a home device that lifts the face (it won’t work, so don’t waste your money) was recently called out by Dr Naomi from The Manse in Melbourne, Australia when they used her patient photos to promote their product. The beautiful results they claimed of their machine were actually from the highly skilled placement of cosmetic injectables. Theft, pure and simple.
Come on beauty industry, why the alley cat morals and blatant disregard for our intelligence? We’re about to boycott some of you. If you want a jump start on who is treating you like a mushroom and keeping you in the dark, head to @beauty.false on Instagram, it is eye wateringly obvious which celebrities and companies are capitalising on your insecurities and stealing your money.
The consumer watch dogs all over the world are onto this too and I think we’re going to start to see some very big fines being issued for false advertising. The UK based Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has been consistently shining the spotlight on the beauty industry. The ASA has identified a breach of their Code of Conduct by reality “stars”, actresses and influencers alike. The ASA points out that consumers are misled about whether content posted on social media counts as ‘advertising’ and the types of claims about the product. Let’s be real, the influencers probably don’t look like that in real life, probably don’t use the product because it doesn’t work and are being paid big bucks to promote the product.
Mega-influencer, Kim Kardashian deleted Facebook and Instagram posts promoting the benefits of a prescription morning sickness drug after they were found to breach US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulations. Her lack of medical credibility is probably only matched by her lack of financial planning qualifications. Oh wait, lawyers have filed a class action against her and Floyd Mayweather for the “pump and dump” of the cryptocurrency EthereumMax. We wonder how many litres of skincare she’s flogged and how many kilograms of pressed eye shadow? Probably a lot because she’s a billionaire.
For a reality check and a really good laugh head to an article on “35 Times Instagrammers Went a Little Overboard With Photoshop”, number 10 where the corner of the influencer’s left eye originates from the bridge of her nose is my favourite. How much longer are we going to be fooled by this sort of nonsense people? 2022 is the year on the “un-influencer”, we are going to see more honesty and integrity from skincare brands and the beauty industry in general, no filters of fakery, good consumer education about how the skin, face and body really ages (with scientific predictably) and the expected clinical course of common skin conditions like acne, rosacea and the aging process.
I am joining creator Sasha Pallari (@sashapallari) and beauty blogger against photo editing, Huda Kattan (@huda) in supporting the REAL truth in beauty with the #filterdrop campaign. “Why do you need to use these things (filters) if the products work?” asks Kattan. “Let’s remove the beauty standard, let’s remove all the bullshit, all the photoshop, all the face tune, all the filters.Let’s get back to the place where we all accept each other and embrace each other.”
Kattan has also kick-started a petition for better regulations from the FDC, calling on influencers to declare if they have enhanced their photos on their social channels, which has been signed by more than 3,000 people. A couple of influencers with integrity like Dutch model @rianne.meijer and Australia’s “Queen of the Real” @celestebarber are totally nailing being “un-influencers” with their honest images and parody.
Personally, I see campaigns like #filterdrop gaining similar traction to the #metoo movement because quite frankly, we’re fed up with being treated as if we are stupid. Please join us to change the landscape of dishonesty.
I would like hear your opinion, have you ever been misled by a beauty brand?
