Adverts, Abs, and the Pendulum Problem

How Beauty Marketing Went Bonkers

If you’ve ever stood in a chemist under the fluorescent lights, holding a high-coverage concealer and a low opinion of your own pores, you already know this story. Ads helped build some frankly bonkers beauty standards, then lurched the other way and seemingly encouraged other extremes.

Somewhere in the middle are real people – including my own children – who will grow up in a world where a lot of images are edited, a lot of “bodies” aren’t bodies at all, and the rules are still being written.

It’s scary.

In 2011 the UK’s ad regulator banned L’Oréal’s airbrushed images of Julia Roberts and Christy Turlington on the grounds they exaggerated what the products could do, a watershed moment that said the quiet part out loud: the bar had crept beyond human.

Below is a brisk tour of how we got here, the research on what this stuff does to people, and what smart brands are doing now to stop making audiences feel rubbish.

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From Airbrush to Algorithm

Sorry-not-sorry about the links.

The industry didn’t stop at heavy-handed retouching. H&M admitted its e-commerce “models” were CGI bodies with real heads pasted on, a cost-saving production trick that also distilled a single, frictionless ideal into pixels. It was honest in the press release.

It was also a perfect metaphor.

Regulators have tightened the screws. In the UK, ads must not include gender stereotypes likely to cause harm, a rule brought in during 2019 after a review of cumulative damage from casual tropes. The ASA later clarified that filters and editing that exaggerate a cosmetic product’s effect can be misleading and therefore non-compliant.

The direction of travel is clear: if an edit changes perceived efficacy, you are on thin ice.

Enforcement bites most visibly in beauty. Rimmel’s Cara Delevingne mascara spot was pulled for lash inserts and over-airbrushing that made the product look magical rather than mascara. No amount of “everyone does it” survived the ruling. The advert promoted the brand’s Scandaleyes Reloaded promising “dangerously bold lashes” and “extreme volume.”

Brands have sometimes led the reform themselves. Dove’s “Evolution” and later “Real Beauty Sketches” helped teach the world how images are built and how harshly many women judge themselves. The latter became the most-viewed online ad of its time, which tells you authenticity can scale as well as aspiration.

What Unrealistic Imagery Does to Real People

There’s a large, imperfect but consistent body of research. Meta-analyses link thin-ideal media to increases in body dissatisfaction and related risks in women, typically small to moderate effects that accumulate with exposure and vulnerability. Laboratory studies show the same direction of travel after short bursts of thin-ideal images. Social platforms amplify it by making appearance comparison the default mode of scrolling.

But it is not all doom.

Experiments that swap in average-size or plus-size models generally report neutral-to-positive effects on viewers’ state body satisfaction without harming ad outcomes, especially when the imagery isn’t framed as a stunt. If your aim is to sell and not make people feel worse, the literature points to diverse, un-retouched creative as a safer baseline. One review synthesised the effects of non-idealised models and found that for body image and well-being, most studies found positive or null effects.

The Pendulum Swing and the “Are we Glorifying Obesity?” Argument

As representation broadened, the culture war arrived. When Cosmopolitan UK put Tess Holliday on the cover, critics called it “as dangerous and misguided as celebrating size-zero”. Editor Farrah Storr replied that celebrating one woman is not the same as celebrating morbid obesity. Analysis shows that the exchange mattered because it forced a better conversation about representation versus health communication, not to mention who gets to police whose body.

This all feels like very shaky ground – and if you feel uncomfortable, you’re not alone.

A year later Nike installed plus-size mannequins at its London flagship. A Telegraph column called them “a dangerous lie”. The backlash was instant and instructive: customers and commentators argued that fitness kit should reflect the customers who use it, and that size alone does not tell you whether someone is an athlete. Public-health experts weighed in to make the obvious point that healthy bodies come in a range of sizes.

Meanwhile, governments have started to tinker at the structural level. Norway now requires a clear label on ads and sponsored posts where body shape, size or skin has been retouched or altered, including filter-based manipulation. You can query how perfectly labels fix culture, but it is a notable attempt to puncture the illusion.

Brand Playbook: Progress That Actually Helps

Some brands have left the safety of platitudes and changed operational practice. Aerie removed retouching in 2014 and grew sales by 20 percent in 2015, with a 26 percent surge in Q4. The campaign’s success was commercial as much as moral. ASOS stopped airbrushing out stretch marks and acne in product shots, normalising texture at the point of sale. Missguided pushed unretouched campaigns and even introduced mannequins with stretch marks and vitiligo in stores, a small but potent cue that “real” belongs in shop windows.

Just as important, we’ve seen what not to do. H&M’s CGI bodies solved a production problem while training shoppers on a single, manufactured silhouette. Mascara claims super-charged by lashes that aren’t really there teach the audience to distrust you. The correction in both cases is the same: make images that tell the truth about what a product does, on bodies that look like the people you sell to.

A Dad’s Note

Before a marketer – I am more importantly a father.

From that perspective; I believe media literacy is more powerful than lectures. When my kids are old enough, I intend to show them how an image comes together. Dove’s original “Evolution” still makes the point in 60 seconds. I feel it’s important to praise bodies for what they do – run, dance, climb, hug – rather than how they look in a still frame. The research will keep debating effect sizes, but you do not need a meta-analysis to model healthy scepticism and self-talk at home.

So Where Should Marketers Land?

Drop the gimmicks and write it into process.

Use diverse talent across size, age, skin tone and ability.

Retouch for dust and colour (obviously not skin colour), not for waists, pores or lashes.

Where you operate under filter-and-retouch labelling rules, treat compliance as a floor, not a ceiling.

Test for brand lift and purchase intent, of course, but add two sentiment checks to your trackers: perceived realism and pressure to look a certain way. If those numbers sag while the CPA looks pretty, you are trading today’s conversion for tomorrow’s reputation.

TL;DR

Ads helped mainstream impossible bodies – from airbrushed celebrities to CGI torsos – and regulators have since pushed back, banning misleading edits and, in places like Norway, requiring labels on retouched images. Evidence links thin-ideal exposure to worse body image for many viewers, while average- and plus-size models tend to improve state body satisfaction without hurting ad effectiveness. The culture-war flare-ups – Tess Holliday at Cosmo and Nike’s plus-size mannequins – created heat, but also forced better questions about realism and health. The brands that made practical changes – Aerie, ASOS, Missguided – proved you can do the right thing and grow. If you market in beauty or fashion, build honesty into the workflow. If you parent, teach the edit, curate the feed, and praise what bodies do.