Pervasive and endless advertising, along with the bias of fashion magazine cosmetics stories, fuels most cosmetics purchases to one degree or another. Advertising must work or the cosmetics industry wouldn’t spend billions of dollars on television, print (particularly fashion magazines), and radio advertising to get you to buy their products. If you don’t understand how advertising manipulates your purchases, you will always be a victim of its wiles and contrivances.
Lots of consumers make decisions about what they are going to buy based strictly on advertising. Is it any wonder that the advertising industry in the United States is a multi – billion-dollar business? Procter & Gamble alone spends $1.3 billion annually to advertise its products to the American public. L’Oreal and Estee Lauder each spend about the same. Companies spend these vast sums on advertising because they want (and get) more sales. Cosmetics companies sign celebrities to multimillion-dollar endorsement contracts because they know certain faces can sell millions of dollars worth of products.
We may think we recognize the influence advertising can have on us, and even feel we are above this kind of blatant artifice. But whether we like to admit it or not, we are greatly influenced by the power of advertising.
Celebrity endorsements are a powerful advertising tool in the cosmetics industry. Celebrities are visible everywhere in infomercials, fashion magazines, and TV ads because we as consumers equate being beautiful, or the ability to act, or any celebrity status with knowledge and integrity. An endorsement by someone with a well-known face carries weight. Enticing as it is to believe that listening to celebrities can help you have better skin and a better look, that’s not the way it is. Do we really believe that the celebrities in the ads for Revlon or Estee Lauder are there because they love the company’s products? Or is it more realistic to see the truth: that these models sign million-dollar contracts to smile brightly, showing their tacit, paid-for approval? A celebrity whose name is attached to a specific line has signed some type of lucrative contract; she’s not endorsing the products because she loves them.
Fashion magazines often comment about products celebrities use separate from a signed endorsement. But actresses and models don’t all use the same products (or the same makeup artist, plastic surgeon, or dermatologist). They use lots and lots of different products in all price ranges from a vast array of lines, and, like all women, they can be fickle. What they use today may not be what they use tomorrow. Celebrities look for “perfect” products just like the next person and are just as subject to being misled and wasting money as anyone else. Besides, what someone else is using doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with your own skin-care or makeup needs.
Perhaps the most insidious and consistent form of cosmetics advertising ploy is showcasing an impossibly perfect, incongruously young woman (or several of them), groomed and photographed at the perfect moment by the best in the fashion world, and seeming to show how well a product works. As if their perfection is a result of any product or product line! In essence, this is fear advertising. Fear that everyone else has the answer, that everyone else is more beautiful and has more perfect skin than you do because they’re using products that you aren’t. This is a compelling, though completely false, message. The women hired for these ads weren’t chosen because they used the product and became beautiful, they were selected from head shot photos provided by modeling agencies.
Fashion and women’s magazines in general are another major source of cosmetics information. Yet the information from these pages is all one-sided. Cosmetics companys’ advertising dollars are the bread and butter of these magazines and the editors aren’t going to provide objective critical information about a main source of income. I can’t tell you the number of reporters who tell me they can’t print what I tell them even though I provide documented, published research proving what I’m explaining. They always say the same thing: Fashion magazines can’t upset their advertisers, and their editors won’t let the content through. There is little to no negative information about any cosmetic product or industry trend. Many women’s magazines love to feature their “best” cosmetic buys, but if you look closely you’ll notice they never include the worst cosmetic buys. If they know what’s best why not tell us what they didn’t like? Of course that is never going to happen, and this puts you at the mercy of misleading, prejudiced information.
What you need to keep in mind about almost all products, whether from the cosmetics industry or any other industry, is that they all have their pros and cons. The truth is that it is the task of the company paying for the ad, or the salesperson selling you the product, to portray the product in absolutely glowing, positive terms. You might still buy the product, but if you’re reading this book at least you will have some facts to base your decision on, not just pretty pictures and catchy words.
As far as cosmetics are concerned, the only objective information is found on the ingredient list. Of course, that’s the only part of the package that never gets featured in the magazines or on television, yet it is the only place where the law requires the manufacturer to tell you the truth.