Looking at Adverts: 12

Recently I have noticed a trend in the names and claims of cosmetic products. The people who produce make-up have begun to say their concealer, moisturiser or lipstick will produce the same effect as a Photoshop technique. Revlon says its ‘Photoready’ makeup will ‘airbrush’ skin to make it appear flawless, while products such as ‘All in One InstaBlur’ by the Body Shop and Garnier’s ‘5 second Blur Skin smoother’ claim to reduce the appearance of pores using ‘blurring’ or ‘liquifying’ technology. These products demonstrate our increasing familiarity with, and reliance on digital manipulation software but they also indicate an anxiety caused by the number of opportunities to be photographed and to photograph one’s self. The rise of the selfie and mobile phone cameras are clearly having an impact.

In ‘Cosmetic Surgery and the Fashionable Face’ Meredith Jones discusses the increasingly blurred boundary between real faces and visual representations of the face. She says that people tend to choose the ‘fashionable faces’ they wish to recreate from magazines, television or films, so they are ‘visibly manufactured’ rather than a ‘natural’ or ‘real’ face. The ‘visibly manufactured’ face is created with studio lighting, makeup, digital manipulation and cosmetic surgery. Because of this trend our standards of beauty are based on stylised and manipulated images rather than real faces.

The way photographs are taken and instantly disseminated on social media networks means that we have less control over how we are photographed and where the pictures appear. As we become accustomed and perhaps reconciled to the ‘bad’ photos that appear on facebook and Instagram, cosmetic products are created that claim to diminish the impact of ‘bad’ photo conditions. As the Revlon Photoready advert states; ‘now there’s no such thing as bad lighting.’

Today anyone can enhance their selfies using in-camera software or digital manipulation programmes such as Photoshop. The prevalence of digital manipulation techniques in cosmetic product names could imply that consumers want to ‘live up’ to the enhanced selfies they have produced. They could also suggest that we wish to be, or perhaps feel that we must be, ‘photo ready’ all the time.

If manipulated selfies and other digitally enhanced representations of faces put us under pressure to look ‘enhanced,’ in the real world, the products claiming to achieve this are also creating challenges for advertising photography. For example, the advertising standards authority banned the advert for ‘The Eraser’ by Maybelline because it used digital manipulation techniques in a way that was deemed to be misleading to the public. Although the advert claimed the product would ‘erase’ wrinkles it seems to need a helping hand from a digital re-toucher.

As a result of this cosmetic product phenomenon the digital manipulators toolbox has been emptied out. Adverts are now stating they are not retouched (although it would be interesting to know how much lighting and digital enhancement is acceptable within this claim). This could be a positive step; for many years consumer groups have campaigned for digital enhancement to be explicitly acknowledged in adverts in the hope of undermining unrealistic beauty standards. By taking Photoshop techniques out of the digital realm and into the real world, will we see increasingly ‘real world’ images of faces? Or have the definitions of ‘real’ and ‘unretouched’ bent to the needs of the advertisers?