EP160. Top 10 most ridiculous beauty industry claims

Last week here on the podcast we talked about beauty brands who've started claiming that they're selling fossil fuel free beauty. Anna Green, Formula Botanica's Education manager, and I unpicked exactly why we think that's a ludicrous claim and we set the world to rights. And this isn't the first time that she and I have picked apart ridiculous claims that regularly come out of the beauty industry. So that got me thinking. Now, if you're a regular follower of this podcast, then you'll know that I love reading about the captivating and occasionally terrifying history of the beauty industry. Last year I interviewed Professor Jeff Jones of Harvard Business School on the podcast who's written the leading book on beauty industry history. And if you haven't heard that episode yet, please do go back and take a listen because it's truly a fascinating subject. Anyway, I started thinking, rather than going heavy this week with another one of my soapbox rants about the evils of the beauty industry, why don't we instead have a bit of fun and look at 10 of the most ridiculous claims made in cosmetics throughout history? After all, these ridiculous claims haven't stopped. The industry is always trying to find a new angle and a new claim to make. So let's put it into historical context by trawling back through the ages. Plug in your earbuds, get ready to laugh or be horrified by my historic review of beauty industry claims. And by the way, you are not going to believe what made the top three Hi, it's Lorraine Dallmeyer, Chartered environmentalist, biologist and CEO of award winning online organic cosmetic formulation school Formula Botanica. I host the Green Beauty Conversations podcast and these are my Green beauty opinions in which I share my takeaways from the podcast interview we released last week and set you a challenge to make the green beauty sector a better place. If you want to be the first to hear all of my latest episodes, make sure you subscribe to this podcast. So it's time to run through my chart of terrible beauty industry claims. However, before we start, I just want to caveat everything I'm about to say in this episode by explaining that all of the adverts I looked at were aimed at heterosexual white women. So if you think I'm being somewhat narrow in my focus, it's important to remember that this is exactly what the beauty industry has always done. Their messaging has always been targeted at one type of person, which they have then portrayed as the beauty ideal. Please believe me when I say this is not a beauty ideal. I subscribe to or buy into at all. So just keep that in mind while I'm talking through my top 10. And with that disclaimer out of the way, let me get started with my top 10 chart of the most ridiculous, horrifying and, yes, sexist claims made by the beauty industry through the ages. Number 10. Charting at number 10, we've got the claim that you might lose your job if you have gray hair. Yes, ladies, your days are numbered in the workplace once you show even a hint of gray. According to a brand from the 1920s called Wyeth, who sold their sage and sulphur compound that claimed to darken gray hairs, it's hard to know where to even start with this one, to be honest. Clearly, the ad wasn't aimed at men, because of course, they still get to rock the title of Silver Fox even today. Now, I think more women are embracing going grey nowadays, but we undoubtedly still have a way to go with the way that these women are perceived. And we do admittedly still see that female TV anchors and actors, they do get shelved when they reach a certain age far quicker than their male counterparts. So it may be that this claim lives on today. Luckily, our employment generally doesn't depend on our hair choices though, and if it does, we now thankfully have discrimination laws on our side. So let's move on with the rest of the chart because believe me, it's only downhill from here. Number nine, let's move on because we've got way more ridiculous claims to cover yet. So claim number nine is that you need to shampoo your hair daily because otherwise your man won't bury his face and hands in your hair to sniff it. So I couldn't stop laughing when I saw an advert by a shampoo brand called Prel which showed an image of a woman with long, flowing blonde locks and there was a man stood right next to her holding a handful of her hair and bringing it up to his nose. So this brand has been around since 1947 and they still sell this shampoo today. I even managed to find it in Amazon. I also found another shampoo brand called g from the 1980s that made exactly the same claim with exactly the same type of ad where a man was standing right behind a woman and rather creepily sniffing her hair. This wasn't a one off anyway. There was more than one brand making this type of claim. So just to share a short personal story for a minute, I'm the mother of two boys. My youngest son is now 10, and since he found the use of his Tiny little hands. When he was 14 weeks old, he's had his hands and his face beat buried in my hair. He sticks his hands through the car seat to hold onto my hair when I'm sat in front of him. He sneaks up behind me when I'm working to smell my hair. He holds my hair like a comfort blanket when I say good night to him. If I even so much as threaten to go to the hairdressers, there's almost like a mutiny in the house. So I have some sympathy for this hair sniffing claim, but the difference, of course, is that I am talking about my son. I grew him, I gave birth to him. This is very different. And you know what? As my kids get older, I will take any excuse I can to cuddle them. Which does, yes, include hair sniffing. However, if my partner started obsessively sniffing my hair, then I think I'd probably have something to say about it. Wouldn't you? Number eight. So let's look at number eight today. Charting at number eight in my list of ridiculous beauty claims is the statement that it is patriotic to look bright and attractive. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, if you are not radiating beauty in times of difficulty, then you have what Helena Rubinstein, one of the founding mothers of the beauty industry, termed war face. So let me read you out the ad that her company published after the First World War broke out in 1914. Here we go. Is yours a war face? Before answering the question, just glance in the mirror. Does your reflection give you quite the satisfaction it gave you in 1914? Perhaps time and trouble have ploughed lines where before the skin was smooth and taut or the complexion is dull and unattractive. In fact, it is probable that the whole face is an index of the cares and war worries that are the lot of 99 women out of every 100 in these troublous times, even if your social and professional life does not demand it, your patriotism demands that you keep your face bright and attractive so that you radiate optimism. You should therefore call on Madame Helena Rubinstein, the renowned face specialist, and see about regaining your good looks. Can you imagine this being published in war zones nowadays? It might be enough for many women to take to arms to do something about it honestly. And this type of message was very common during both the first and Second World Wars. But we'll talk more about that in a later entry in my chart. Number seven. So what's next? Well, claim number seven in my top ten is that you can only keep your husband if you get rid of Your dishpan hands. So, in the 1930s, a brand called Luxe made an advert titled romance dies at the touch of dishpan hands. In other words, they were saying that if your hands get rough and chap from washing the dishes, that your husband might leave you. Now, admittedly, this advert was made for dishwashing detergent, but I think this claim is worth including in this list as it's not even been 90 years since women were told to do all the washing up and to keep their hands smooth and young, as they'd otherwise find their husbands leaving them, apparently. So Lux famously even ran tests with hundreds of women where half the group washed dishes for 28 days with Lux and the other half used regular dish soap. And after a month, the control group had cracked red hands and apparently the Lux group didn't. I would have loved to have seen the formulation to find out what was in it, but I couldn't find it online anywhere, sadly. Luckily, I think I probably won't have to worry about my partner leaving me for my dishpan hands. Although to be fair, I use washing up gloves when I do the dishes and he does most of the washing up anyway. So luckily, times have changed. But Lux wasn't the only one making this type of claim and it wasn't specific to detergents. Palmolive, who I'm sure you know from Modern Times as well, used to sell facial soap and they published an advert for their soap titled Would your Husband Marry youy Again? Suggesting that many women would no longer be attractive to their partners if they weren't using the right facial products. There's more to unpick here, I'm sure you get that, but we'll return to this topic later on in the charts. Number six. Let's move on to number six and let's cover a claim that we see everywhere, all the time, which is that your beauty products will make your wrinkles, your fine lines and your eye bags disappear, not just temporarily reduce in appearance, but actually disappear. And it goes without saying that none of us can stop the hands of time. And you can't just turn back the clock on your skin. And sure, there are ingredients that can firm up the skin and perhaps temporarily smooth out some of those lines that show that you've lived your life, but it would be ridiculous for anyone to claim that they can erase wrinkles forever. The beauty industry is awash with these claims and they have been around for centuries. One of the first adverts for Pond's Vanishing Cream said that the cream would Cause lines, wrinkles, blemishes and roughness to disappear. Presumably that's also why they included the word vanishing in their product name. I also found an ad for a brand called Seventh Veil that boldly claimed never grow old in its headline. So I'm guessing this entry in my top 10 chart probably doesn't surprise you. And we'll come back to this in later entries too. Let's keep going. Number five. So number five, closely following the last example, is that some beauty products will make your skin like that of a child. I saw several very old ads, including at least one from Palmolive again that claimed that you would get a schoolgirl complexion from their facial soap. Now, I personally find that quite creepy on many levels. Firstly, why should grown adult women need to look like a schoolgirl? Why should anyone, in fact, want to look like a child once they've reached adulthood? And secondly, I don't remember having perfect blemish free skin when I was a schoolgirl. Neither did any of my friends. Quite the opposite, in fact, unless we're going all the way back to the days of primary school or first school, which I sincerely hope we're not, because that's even creepier, let's face it. Nonetheless, that didn't stop a couple of brands from claiming that their bars of face soap would cause your complexion to become childlike. And by the way, this isn't limited to the history of the beauty industry either, because there are still lipsticks for sale on the market now that have names like Underage Red or Barely Legal. So creepy. Yes, yes, it most definitely is. Number four. Number four. Getting closer to the top of my chart. And we're now really starting to leave historical claims behind and moving into more modern time sometimes. So number four is all about the brand Lip for slim, who in 2020, and you are honestly not going to believe this, launched a lipstick that claims to cause weight loss. They called themselves, and I quote, the first and only nutraceutical lip tint in the world. Developed to act on fat burning and slimming, appetite inhibition, improvement of serotonin production and reduction of fat. Who knew that losing weight could be as simple as just popping on some lipstick? And this lipstick, launched on the Brazilian market to a fair amount of skepticism and ridicule. Very understandably, the brand initially tried to register their lipstick as a cosmetic, but was told that wouldn't work. So it ended up being registered as a slimming device. It is nowhere to be found online anymore in case you do want to try weight loss lipstick. So I would hazard a guess that it got pulled from the market shortly after launch. If weight loss was seriously that easy, I think other brands would be doing it. Number three. We're now entering the top three. And you'll be pleased to hear that I have saved the best for last. So charting at number three comes the claim that your beauty products will give you confidence. And let's face it, for many people, this is exactly the case, and there is actually nothing wrong with that. But what is wrong with it? It's the beauty industry that created many of our insecurities in the first place. Let's not forget that until the 1920s, women didn't even wear makeup. We've only been using color cosmetics for 100 years, and now there's this expectation that women will wear all of them all the time. And since the industry is no longer able to tell us that, we'll now get sacked from our jobs or lose our partners for not using beauty products, they've now instead lumped much of their marketing under this umbrella of giving yourself confidence. As Mary Kay, the company that I'm sure you know, put in one of their early adverts, they said, by applying Mary Kay products yourself, you won't just look terrific for a day, you'll look terrific every day. You'll learn how much you have going for you. Or as another much older advert for face powder said, your face is your fortune. This messaging comes back everywhere throughout the modern beauty industry. And it's like it's the modern marketing message, the version to replace the need to win your man by looking beautiful. As a complete side note, I have to say, I often look at the men I'm talking to, and then I stand there marveling at the fact that there is no societal expectation on them to wear makeup. Do you do this as well? I find I'm doing it all the time. I sit there and I look at them, and then I wonder, I think to myself, what would you look like with eyeliner or mascara or lipstick? And then my next thought is always, why should a woman be expected to wear makeup when you're not? There's such a weird split now. There's obviously a massive market here for men's makeup, which is why that category is also growing. And don't get me wrong, if you want to wear makeup, please go for it. I wear it, too. But I don't like being told by the beauty industry that I should wear makeup and should use skincare to give myself confidence. When I derive more confidence from, say, closing a business deal, or mastering a complicated guitar lick, or challenging myself to learning something new, or simply, you know, receiving unconditional love from the people closest to me. That's what should be heralded as confidence boosting. Number two. So let's move on to number two, because we are almost at the top of the charts. So at number two, charting with some force, come all of the greenwashing claims that we've read from the modern beauty industry. There are just so many of them that I could have probably recorded an entire podcast on the top 10 worst greenwashing claims. And you know what? Perhaps that's another episode for the future. So in this category of greenwashing, we can include claims from brands that tell us they're using sustainable packaging because their plastic is now finally recyclable, completely ignoring the fact that we don't even recycle 10% of the plastics that are flooding planet Earth. Or brands telling us that their packaging is recyclable when parts of it aren't. Or brands confusing circularity with recyclability. Or brands offering refills with superfluous single use packaging around them. Or brands claiming to be sustainable when they're using only natural ingredients, which of course has precisely nothing to do with sustainability. We've covered this previously on the podcast here and as you heard in last week's podcast, any brand claiming to be fossil fuel free will fall into this category as well. Now, luckily, new laws are being brought in in different parts of the world, such as the eu, and hopefully the rest of the world will follow because we need to crack down hard on greenwashing claims. So luckily, I think the beauty industry marketing departments of the world will be reined in before they will really get a good chance to get going here. Number one. So that brings us to the top of my charts, the number one in my top ten chart of ridiculous claims throughout the ages of the beauty industry. We started at the beginning of the modern beauty industry around the late 1800s, early 1900s, and we've worked ourselves through to more modern times which currently occupy the top spots in my charts. And you will be pleased to learn that I have saved the best for last. So I'm a proud feminist. So this is my favourite claim to deeply shame on this podcast. And in my opinion, it's one of the worst of all. Because although it's not a claim that the beauty industry would spell out these days, it still underpins much of the way they position their adverts. That claim is of course, that by wearing their skincare cosmetics, makeup using their hair care, you will get your man. We've already covered some of this in the top 10 by looking at shampoos that make men want to sniff your hair, or face soap, or dish soap that will prevent your man from leaving you. Or confidence boosting cosmetics that would allow you to light up a room and attract your man. So this one, I'm sure, really won't surprise you, and I'm sure you understand why it's in the top spot. If I wanted to list all of the adverts I saw while I was researching this podcast that really explicitly tell us that we need to look more beautiful to attract men, honestly, I would be here for hours and hours and hours. Like the face powder advert I saw titled Be His Pinup Girl. Or the red lipstick advert titled Bring the Sparkle to His Eyes. Or the wartime facial soap advert There's Palm Olive again titled I Pledge Myself to Guard Every Bit of Beauty that He Cherishes in Me. Or the Revlon foundation advert from 1961 titled why Tell Him It's Makeup, He's Convinced it's you. I could go on and on and on with the examples. There have been hundreds of brands claiming that by using their skincare, hair care, makeup, deodorants, perfume, whatever, that you'll be able to get your man. And while the beauty industry isn't that explicit nowadays because they know they'd get torn to shreds, they simply do it in a different way by making us all feel that we have to stay young forever. Some beauty product names are also sexualized by some brands. I won't give any examples here because then I'd have to put an explicit sticker on this episode. But all you have to do is google it to see what I mean. Or just look at some of the names given to perfumes, for instance, such as Obsession, Allure, J', Adore, Temptress, it's all there for us to see. It's still happening all the time. So that concludes my top 10, and I know it's quite the list. I also think it really summarizes the beauty industry perfectly. A long history of insane claims with no end in sight. And I thankfully know that the indie beauty sector can and does do a lot better than this, which is why I do also hold a lot of hope for the future. So my challenge to you for this week is to keep in mind that a lot of what you see and hear come out of the beauty industry is just a load of hype and fluff. Don't ever be scared to challenge it. Use my list this week to see through the nonsense. And just always remember that when you're looking at a bottle or a jar and it's promising you the earth, that those claims might not be entirely true. Thank you for listening to my Green Beauty opinions. Remember to visit the Formula botanica website@formulabotanica.com to try our free online formulation course. And if you haven't subscribed yet to the Green Beauty Conversations podcast, please make sure you do so now in your favourite podcast app. Leave me a five star review if you enjoy the conversations I host and I'll be back soon with my next episode.