Recently I watched BBC’s documentary ‘The Truth About Looking Good’, in which presenter Cherry Healey investigates secrets of the beauty and skincare industry. One thing that struck me was a social experiment carried out, where customers shopping for skincare products were asked to partake in a survey. Unknown to them, the survey attempted to measure their level of self-esteem at the point of their purchasing decision. Interestingly, the results showed a clear correlation between customers’ experiencing lower self-esteem and deciding to buy a product.
So, experiencing lower self- confidence when viewing a product perhaps makes us more inclined to buy that product. Beauty companies playing on consumers’ self-esteem is a subtle marketing strategy we should be aware of. Often, products are marketed to us in a way that causes us to experience lower self-esteem. This in turn makes us inclined to purchase that product, since it promises to grant us the confidence boost we want. It drops our self-esteem first, then lifts it up when we decide to buy the product, for a short while at least.
An example is make-up products like foundation. Often, they are advertised to us on the promise to give us smooth, flawless looking skin. Rather than showing what the foundation would actually look like on a typical, average person’s skin, adverts will repeatedly show models with glowing, airbrushed skin, completely free of spots or blemishes, in a way no one looks like in real, everyday life. They usually exude confidence. Our natural reaction to seeing images like that is to compare our own face to the model’s, and, almost inevitably, it can cause us to feel less confident about ourselves. We feel we’re lacking in something. In this case, it’s flawless skin. And the product promises to give this to us. We’re more inclined to end up buying the product, because then we’ll feel like we’re not lacking, and we’ll attain a higher self-esteem and confidence, like the model has. Our mind associates confidence and happiness with something purchasable. Of course, after we buy the product we realise that it just doesn’t look as good on our face as it does on the photoshopped model’s. This is because we’re being sold a level of perfection which is unrealistic and unattainable.
Another example is the anti-ageing skincare industry, which is huge right now. Oftentimes adverts will show middle aged or older women with glowing faces and smiles, usually having fun with family, and just generally living a healthy, happy life, whilst retaining their youthful glow. What we’re subtly being told, though, is that it is because they managed to stay looking young that they can lead such a happy life. This entices women to buy the product, since its only once they attain this wrinkle-free skin that they can live their best life and be confident and happy. In this way, a large part of it is psychological. We are sold dreams, not just products.
There’s nothing wrong with enjoying make-up and skincare products. Nor is there anything wrong with wanting to look good. But we should buy products if we want to, not because we feel we need to. And we should be aware of subtle techniques that influence our choices as consumers. It’s useful to focus more on the actual product itself than to pay attention to enticing images and questionable claims often shown in advertising. Most importantly, we should try to not fall into the trap of thinking we can only be confident once we achieve the ideal image marketed to us. If we disassociate feelings of confidence and self-esteem from cosmetic and skincare products, we’ll be happier, and so will our bank accounts.