Makeup Ads Banned in UK for Too Much Photoshop

I just read on PetaPixel that the "Advertising Standards Authority, the ad industry watchdog in the UK, has banned an advertisement by Lancome featuring Julia Roberts for being misleading, stating that the flawless skin seen in the photo was too good to be true."

I'm curious to know how fellow photographers and retouchers feel about standards and regulations governing our practices where advertising is concerned. How would it effect the way we do our jobs or how we look at things aesthetically, creatively and socially?

 
"The spread, shot by Mario Testino, shows 43-year-old Roberts glowing and fresh-faced, the result of having used Lancome's Teint Miracle foundation. The ad claims the foundation 'recreates the aura of perfect skin.'"




"The ad authority also went after the cosmetics company for altering photos of natural beauty Christy Turlington in an ad for Maybelline's The Eraser foundation, which contrasts parts of the model's face covered in foundation to parts left untouched."



 

I understand that their primary concern centers around exagerated product claims but I can't help but feel there is the deeper issue here, concerning the unrealistic perception of health and beauty that advertisers and the media places on people. Would it be such a bad thing if we had someone looking over our shoulders while we did post production, going, "tsk tsk tsk"?

 
via [PetaPixel], [NYDailyNews]

 
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Kenn Tam's picture

Been holding this damn camera in my hand since 1991.
Toronto / New York City

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73 Comments
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As both a photographer and casual retoucher who lives/works/plays in the UK, I'm glad they've started doing things like this. The french seem to be getting it right in my opinion, and the rest of world should follow suit.

Ban pizza ads... drink ads... burger ads... hell... let's just ban all magazine photography period. This is RIDICULOUS.

Next, they will start banning ads because the lighting is too flattering. Where is THE LINE?

Too much grey area and almost impossible to govern...  I don't like the way it's all going lately either, the world of fashion has sterilised the human race into pampered, spoilt brats..  The money poured into this could do so much more but people's vanity seems to be self prioritised over everything else.

I can see both sides of the argument, and I feel inclined to lean more towards the false advertising side of things, but I can also feel for the artists,although having worked in advertising, the work ends up feeling more like work than art anyways.
See if you guys can get your hands in a documentary called Art and Copy, pretty good stuff, about advertising and the manipulation of the masses.

I don't think this is a question of aesthetics, it is simply about the fact, that her shopped fare implies that lancome's make-up can make you look like Roberts on this picture, which it can't.

It's like if an ad claims that their yoghurt can make your ears shrink. That's not just deceptive, it is an outright lie.

However, I agree, that there is nothing morally wrong with photoshopping a face, even to that extent. If that photo was to be used on a poster for a movie, so what, no one's going to have a problem with that.

Where do you draw the line? What about great lighting? On the other hand, if a company is selling a product that is designed to alter the appearance of one's skin, they should have to show what that makeup really does. If they retouch a model's skin who is selling clothing, who cares?

But the fact remains that the advertisement was not used for promoting anything else but to acquire a way to achieve a flawless skin as showcased which can be very misguiding to a lot of people. There is nothing wrong with post- production of an image, everyone does it, but to what extent is the question.

When middle aged women with near perfect skin to begin with (and a bearing a striking resemblance to Ms Roberts) start having their make up applied on daily basis by a professional and have headshots taken by Testino, THEN they'll have grounds to complain.

Aside: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsqahGYl21 <- Not sure about Julia, but you /can/ look like Angelina :3

sounds like this is the old argument for responsibility that has been inherent in the free market system aeons before P.T. Barnum informed us about the gestation schedule of suckers (caveat emptor comes to mind). the last thing we need is another "watchdog" organization with the ability to be corrupted to force a mandate on a non-existant problem. guns, tobacco, video games, processed fossil fuels and cell phones have all had their time in front of judges and throngs of angry, self-promoting do-gooders portending the doom of society if these are not thoroughly regulated. in some cases, this could be true, but the base problem in most, if not all of these cases I feel is the responsibility of the individual buyer. few enough people take responsibility for their actions in the pedestrian goings-on without much of a care as to their effect on those around them and when it does come time to own up to the blame, the finger pointing is fierce and loud.

It's scary to read people relying on individual responsability (when comes the times to see if you're being  lied at).

Does this mentality applies to those who are unable to see the diffrence? Those with mental challenges? Old people who have degenerative mental states?

and the responsability to the buyer? REALLY? and this applies to everything? No regulation for nothing? "guns, tobacco, video games, processed fossil fuels and cell phones " How about explosives? Toxic material? Radioactive metals? Poisons? Drugs? Should we deregulate those too? Let the buyer be responsible of the information about the product? Why not sell depleted uranium pellets as alternate medecine? Let the man do the reading of the label that coud kill him?

"According to UNICEF, "Nearly a billion people will enter the 21st century unable to read a book or sign their names and two thirds of them are women." reading the label and making an informed decision is out of reach of at least a billions human on the planet.

Hi Patrick, you're right about the slippery slope. There is an old movie with Michael Douglas called "Falling Down" where he goes into a fast food restaurant and orders french fries and demands that they look exactly like the fries in the picture in the advertisement. This scene was popular because mainstream audiences have always been aware that advertising is not exactly representative of reality.  I wouldn't worry too much about censorship because it's essentially not enforceable (over time) in the United States, but I would worry about audience perceptions and how they will react to digital work and manipulation/retouching as we head into the future.

Artists often talk about "auras" that surround art objects. Many would find it fascinating to be in the presence of something like the Mona Lisa painting because of it's aura. Photography is a relatively new medium and the chemical process of creating a photograph, especially in the 1800s,  carried an aura of appeal. People were amazed that an image would appear "as if by magic" through a chemical process.

Digital is simple, fast and easy for everybody to create a photograph.  The ease of use associated with digital has destroyed much of the aura surrounding the picture making process. However, digital has also made it easier and more popular to manipulate images than ever before. Liberal use of manipulation has caused audiences to question more about the authenticity of the subjects contained in photos. People now want to know if the subject is real. They look at a photographs and ask themselves... "Is it real?"

The question of reality has shifted the aura in photography from the early days of chemical process to the modern day authenticity of the subject in a digital photograph. This shift in aura is going to dominate future taste in the marketplace. Photographers that create work that audience perceive as authentic depictions of genuine subject matter are going to be rewarded. Their work will contain the aura of authenticity. On the contrary, photographers that are very liberal in their application of manipulation techniques will find their work increasingly more difficult to sell in a marketplace that will continue to make further demands for greater reality.

I think the main issue here that advertising, all kinds of it, creates "false" reality which leads many people (mostly teenagers but not only them) to believe that somewhere there exists "perfect life" with unrealistically beautiful men and women, who always smile and are generally perfect. This makes people look around, see their "less than perfect" life and feel bad about it and about themselves. So they will buy the advertising products dreaming of making their life perfect as it looks in advertisement.
And this is truly misleading.

As impossibly unnattainable as things may seem, they are goals one can strive for even if they should never make it to that point. Where would we be if we didn't believe in alternative uses for technology past, that has created the technology of the present, or even the future. Things may seem impossible. Sometimes they are, but perhaps we are all missing something. Did anyone think that the advertisement might not just be marketing to the target market, but simultaneously making a future for image retouching? It doesn't benefit the company selling the product directly, but it would benefit the company doing the retouching to have more talent.

People get implants and surgeory to modify themselves. They can also get peircings and tattoos. Should all of those be banned as well? They are false representations of who you are. I would go even further and say that wearing clothes is a false representation of ones body. Where do we draw the line?

The key difference you are missing here is that Makeup, unlike the other things you mentioned, exists to provide a false representation of one's skin, so if you apply the product to a model and then retouch the image, you are unrealistically representing the effectiveness of the product (ie it's ability to make your skin look better than it actually is). 

You are missing the point that the alterration you mention, are REAL in a sens that one person CAN look like this with surgery, clothes etc...

No one can walk around with a digitaly enhanced face. Apples and oranges.

I normally don't agree with many of the recent infringements of many government authorities; but, I do have to agree with the Advertising Standards Authority on this one.

Retouching, in my opinion has crossed a line, and is having an adverse affect on the little girls, young women, and women in our society.  Women, young women, girls are being bombarded with images of flawlessness/perfection, which is impossible for them to achieve; yet, they try to achieve it. Dove has a campaign which addresses this issue and you can find the video on YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYhCn0jf46U 

Related to the above video and the same campaign is this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ei6JvK0W60I&feature=related

I have a little girl and despite any imperfections she may have, which I am oblivious to, she is beautiful no matter what.

Most impressively, Dove manages to stay profitable while telling women around the world to love their own body and not try to change it.

Proofs, that you don't have to sell lies and alternate realities to make money.

This is the unfortunates and pressures that our children must face, and have to live with. As a photographer, I don't photoshop. I edit. But keep it real. 

The illusion of advertising is always just that, an illusion.  Take food photography, when have you ever purchased a MacDonald's hamburger that looks like the ad.  It is the job of the photographer and digital artist to help the client sell the illusion.  To stop the viewer and say wow, I want that.  We all strive for perfection but rarely get it.  So would you really want to purchase makeup if the photo shows a pimple faced model with pits in her skin?  We know the models are made up, digitally enhanced, and even made to not look real.  The advertiser is not trying to hide that fact but to say the product will help. We do not need to start requiring ads to all have disclaimers like, if you use our product you most likely will not look like Julia Roberts and by the way this ad shows digitally enhanced skin.  We the consumer really know that.  Give the consumer a little credit of some intelligence.  After all most all professional portrait studios now digitally enhance there clients photos and none of my clents say "Hay, it does not look like me, I want the mole back".    

Nowhere in the ad does it claim to make anyone look like the photograph. It advertises improvement, but to no specific level, which is clearly listed on the product's disclaimers. I understand that the British government is somewhat dictatorial in comparison to the U.S., but this is going a bit too far, even for a pseudo-free nation. What is the next step? Banning ALL food ads and pictures? Banning ALL tourism photos used to entice visitors that use ND or circ polarizer filters because they intensify a drab place you wouldn't actually want to visit into an image of incredible beauty, and therefore again false advertisement? 

If the British government is going to act like a dictatorship, then they should stop their own hypocritical alterations of ALL publicity shots of the royal family. Talk about photoshop...just look at the official shots of the big wedding!!!

It's the same concept as putting marbles in the bottom of soup bowls.  The product IS THERE...just "enhanced".  It's this "enhancement" that is considered "Deceptive" by law people.  
NOW, conversely, if this is advertising your PHOTO BUSINESS...well, that's a different story.