Rachel Weisz L'Oréal Ad Banned in Britain

U.K. advertising watchdog nixes a face cream promo featuring the 41-year-old Oscar winner for being too airbrushed

By Natalie Finn Feb 01, 2012 3:45 AMTags
Rachel Weisz, L'Oreal L'Oreal

For a local girl, Rachel Weisz sure just got the cold shoulder in London.

L'Oréal Paris became the latest cosmetics company to run afoul of the United Kingdom's Advertising Standards Authority, which deemed a print ad for Revitalift Clinical Repair 10 featuring the Oscar winner to be, well...not fit for print!

Is it that racy?

No, the L'Oréal ad didn't get banned for the same reasons that highly stylized fragrance ads featuring Dakota Fanning and Hailee Steinfeld were outlawed. (Too provocative and supposedly romanticizing suicide, respectively.)

Instead, it was banned for the same reason that Lancôme ads starring Julia Roberts and Christy Turlington were nixed!

Weisz is beautiful, for sure, but the ASA just couldn't get behind the 41-year-old's smooth-as-a-baby's-bottom visage in ruling that the advertisement "misleadingly exaggerated" the product's promised effect.

"The beauty and advertising industries need to stop ripping off consumers with dishonest images," said MP Jo Swinson, who served as head complainer about the aforementioned ads. "The banning of this advert, along with the previous ASA rulings banning heavily retouched ads featuring Twiggy [in 2009], Julia Roberts and Christy Turlington, should act as a wake-up call."

Meanwhile, L'Oréal, which admits to touching up the photo, as it does all photos, is standing firm (no pun intended).

"The ad sought to represent Rachel Weisz as favorably as possible and therefore every effort had gone into ensuring the most flattering set-up," the Paris-based company said in a statement. "Rachel Weisz had been professionally styled and made-up and then lit and shot by a professional photographer in a studio setting. The photo was shot using a lot of light in order to make the picture more flattering and to reduce the appearance of imperfections in the ensuing image by giving the image a soft focus and lower resolution."

Although it's hard to tell from looking at most magazines and billboards, this sort of anti-airbrushing campaign isn't singular to the U.K., either.

Procter & Gamble voluntarily pulled a CoverGirl ad with Taylor Swift (who's 22!) after the U.S.' National Advertising Division deemed the ad too Photoshopped to be a reliable indicator of just how thick your lashes could get with NatureLuxe Mousse Mascara.

Talk about splitting hairs!

Meanwhile, back in the U.K., the ASA did not challenge L'Oréal's promises that the Revitalift product in question makes skin feel firmer, more toned and more supple. The watchdog just didn't approve of Weisz's face being used to demonstrate the smoother and more even complexion that L'Oréal promises.

Ouch.

"We considered that the image had been altered in a way that substantially changed her complexion to make it appear smoother and more even," the ASA stated. ‘We therefore concluded that the image in the ad misleadingly exaggerated the performance of the product."