Beauty in eye of begrudger
Kathy O'Meara on why beauty marketing is so out of touch with modern female thinking

So, the latest buzz from the sagacious world of fashion and beauty is, tired drum roll…Diversity (dahlings). What this means to all of us lesser mortals (aka consumers), who don’t exist within the highly rarified, scented confines of this gorgeous set, is that, suddenly, everyone is beautiful. So that’s okay then. Pity we overdid the Botox though.

The snake oil salesmen may realise that images of bland, flawless, size zero, ridiculously youthful perfection do not convince consumers as to the efficacy of their products. There is a phrase in sport called The Competence Gap, which describes the fast motivational breakdown in amateur sportsmen who hold up elite heroes as their inspiration.

It’s the reason that few people ever really get properly fit as a result of an Olympic year. Likewise, women who truely believe that using Luscious Lash mascara will turn them into the gorgeous pouting Megan Fox, complete with lash inserts and enhanced in post production, are now, mercifully, thin on the ground – just like their eyelashes.

Since time immemorial, man has admired the many and varied manifestations of female beauty, garnering a richly diverse wish list encompassing Cleopatra to Circe, ‘the loveliest of all immortals’. It does not mean that anything goes – frankly, I would not have the remotest interest in resembling the Bride of Wildenstein, for example – but it does recognise that the notion of bland conventional beauty is being outed as a fraud.

Aphrodite works her mysterious charms on a laudably catholic array of females and often only in the Cyclops eye of a single admirer. There is no grand design, no symmetrical ideal and no build-a-perfect-woman papyrus in existence. From embracing age – the delectable Helen Mirren, anyone? – to disability – Alison Lapper lording it in Trafalgar Square – to outright obesity – the frankly porcine Beth Ditto – the doctrine we are all exhorted to worship now: Every Woman Can Be Beautiful, feels uncannily familiar.

The latest company to buff up this so-obvious-it’s-in-neon idea and plagiarise it mercilessly is L’Oreal Paris. Ads with touched-up celebrities have been ridiculed – and rightly so. Company boss Pierre-Yves Arzel talks the talk: “The complexity of who we are as people makes us beautiful. ‘Because I’m worth it’ is about beauty being a means of self-affirmation, of achievement, and a true indicator of personality and confidence.”

Now I’m all for seeing interesting, even eccentric faces, bodies and characters peering out from the glossies and on our TV screens, as Unilever has done with its Dove ads. I buy into the thinking that by making the image more accessible and more recognisable, we can reflect the consumer more accurately without diluting the aspiration.

Charmed Offensive Cheryl Cole has fronted for L’Oreal Paris, the beauty products brand which tries to convince consumers “they’re worth it”. But recent L’Oreal ads were reported to the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) for excessive touching-up of models.

I applaud unconventionality in all its fabulous, foxy, furry, frivolous forms. But to dress up (literally) this notion and present it as something which somehow ‘empowers’ women really gets my goat. If I want self-affirmation I look, not in the mirror, but at what the acclaimed English novelist Jane Austen coyly referred to as my “accomplishments”.

Quite how a slick of Ruby Woo or a dollop of Idealist signifies ‘achievement’ is quite beyond my ken. Are women really that suggestible? Do they swallow whole any message that tells them authoritatively that to be beautiful is to be successful, admired, envied even? Not in my circle. Yes, putting your best face forward is, on the whole, a reasonably good idea (so as not to frighten the fish), but most women are far too busy, intelligent and gainfully employed to care whether their face or form fits with this week’s beauty ideal.

This is not a rampaging feminist viewpoint. It just feels like this marketing speak is sadly out of kilter with modern female thinking. Time was when the pearls of beauty wisdom emanating from the ivory towers of Estee Lauder et al were lapped up voraciously (‘It’s the simple faith: slap on the cream, wake up the dream.’). Times change. Caveat emptor.

Or should that be caveat venditor? Caution should rest with the seller. Women long ago wised up to the axiom that there’s nowt more gullible than the woman promised the genie of beauty in a bottle. But the cosmeticians continue to preach their same hackneyed credo, addressing their modern, educated, informed consumers as credulous morons.

Perhaps it’s just me, but it seems rather disingenuous to rabbit on about the celebration of diversity, while in the same breath issuing the caveat: “But don’t even think about going out without pettifogging about with serum, pore reducer, wrinkle filler, moisturiser, primer, illuminiser and foundation.” So here’s a mad plan worth testing…

Instead of treating women with patriarchal condescension in advertising, why not recognise that on a good day, most women will happily settle for ‘reasonably attractive’, perhaps consigning the pursuit of beauty to their airbrushed wedding day photos. We basically want to look younger than we are, not exhausted, not fat and certainly not like our mothers. If we can have that, in a bottle, advertised honestly, demand will follow.

Kathy O’Meara is a director of MediaRepublic

kathy@mediarepublic.ie