The Product: SK-II Facial Treatment Essence
The video opens with an old woman sitting with her pre-K granddaughter in a traditional Japanese style house surrounded by natural scenery of oriental shrubs and trees. If these carefully constructed backdrops don’t already drive the message home, the paper crane crafting session taking place certainly does: make no mistake, we have landed in Japan. Then our unbelievably cute little actress asks the million-dollar question: “Why are your hands different from mine, Grandmother?” And there it is. The story unfolds over paddy fields and through villages (no seriously, the crane comes to life and the little girl chases it) to land in a remote sake brewery high in the mountains. Why do Grandma’s hands look like those of a twenty-year-old hand model? She used to work in a sake brewery (SK-II USA). A combination of yeast and “vitamins, amino acids, minerals and organic acids” and well you know what they say—it was a match made in heaven (“The Miracle”).
Then the home run: this secret strain of yeast is called Pitera, says the video, and it’s made by SK-II.
This inspiring story of discovery is in fact the story of how SK-II skin care originated. It goes like this: Some dedicated scientists were determined to find the solution for perfect skin. Years of research all over the world led them to Japan, where they observed the youthful hands of some old sake brewers in a remote village known as Akita. More research and late lab nights led them to the particular yeast strain yielding these magical results, which they named Pitera (“The Miracle”).
All those years in high school buying out the skin care section at our local drugstore in what can only be described as a desperate attempt to achieve “perfect,” acne-free skin and now here was the answer to my prayers. The poster-child for every beauty product on the shelf seemed to have at last found her happy ending in the form of this $290 “promise of crystal clear skin that is yours to always keep” (“The Miracle”).
And that’s where the interest (okay, infatuation) stopped—right about the moment when I got online and searched the price of this magic liquid. Two hundred and ninety dollars could buy my fall semester books (ok, one book. Just one. But still.) How could it possibly cost that much? I’m not going to lie, I did consider selling an organ. Or stealing a painting from a museum. But you have to drawn the line somewhere.
After viewing another ad for SK-II Facial Treatment Essence in Harper Bazaar’s August 2014 issue, I found myself questioning whether this hefty price was actually for a worthy product or just its incredibly appealing image. The ad featured a youthful, clear-skinned Asian woman holding the SK-II bottle next to her face, with a caption that read: “The secret behind the youthful skin of Asian women.” The ad went on to explain; “Are all Asian women born with good skin? No, but they have discovered the secret ingredient for youthful, ageless skin—PITERA” (Harper’s Bazaar). The marketing strategy at hand was entirely reminiscent of the ‘I’ll Have What She’s Having’ orgasm scene from When Harry Met Sally—except in this scenario, we weren’t talking about food, but rather skin care, and the object of inspiration was not Sally’s fake orgasm but the supposedly flawless skin of Asian women at large who were now apparently unified in a beauty regiment only accessible to American women through SK-II products.
Why use Asia as a marketing focus? Interestingly, the original Pitera product began to gain international success more than two decades after its 1970 discovery when its brand name, Max Factor, was incorporated under the international umbrella of Procter and Gamble in 1991 (“Max”). The product has continued its upward trajectory of success since; according to Procter and Gamble “The SK-II prestige skincare brand achieved Billion-Dollar Brand status in March 2012” (“Billion-dollar”). I’m guessing this success has something to do with a perfectly calculated marketing mixture of oriental exoticism, language of “the best kept secret,” and an absurd price, which always seems to imply results and further cements an exclusive appeal—all of which are aimed at the American consumer.
So how does all this relate to poster-child me, dreaming of perfect skin?
Ads like those of SK-II highlight the extent to which the “story” factors into cost as much as the product contents. And while this particular product story is supposedly true—the company claims Pitera was in fact discovered in sake breweries—this history is presented to consumers in an amplified, romanticized, and highly racialized narrative (think little girl chasing crane) that capitalizes on notions of Asian women as part of an all-encompassing racial group superior in skincare and beauty, and exotic in appeal. This process of “othering,” while seemingly positive (what’s wrong with paying a compliment when its due?) in fact only further reaffirms stereotypes.
It’s great to open a magazine to an ad containing a non-white model. But is this the kind of representation that Asian-American women need? As Nicholas Hartlep notes in his book The Model Minority Stereotype: Demystifying Asian American Success, “…mainstream media contributes to the homogenization of Asian Americans” (Hartlep 50). The image? An exotic, ‘othered’ woman who offers us reassurance that perfect skin is simply a matter of mimicking the “experts.”
So What’s the Solution?
I am calling for us ladies (and men) to engage our critical consumer persona as well as our giddy fifteen-year-old drugstore addict. We are standing on the precipice (and some of us are already well there) of earning our own living so it seems only right to know what we are buying.
For those few life-changing products that actually perform according to their claims, this may not present a problem. But what about when these promises don’t deliver? Or when those that do, only deliver for some? Could it be because you bought a repackaged image instead of a revolutionary product? It’s not all happily ever after for those who purchase SK-II. We know that. Just type SK-II into Google and you’ll find just as many people who found the product entirely unhelpful. This is just as much a race issue as a cost one. Because while an absurd price may have been what initially caught my attention, the ethical problem with racialized marketing strategies such as SK-II’s means that baby-sitting for those precious extra funds for that dream product is not the end-all be-all solution.
The Bottom-Line
If you’re anything like me and forced from mere lack of hours in the day to choose between the cute video, and product review sites like Allure Product Finder and Makeup Alley, it may be a better investment to go straight to the ratings instead of falling in love with a product’s promise. And know that you are purchasing a lot more than face cream when you “unlock the well-kept secret” of SK-II Facial Treatment Essence (Harper’s Bazaar).