On Tuesday, December 17th, we had an interview with Martha Brooks, the Executive Creative Director at L’Oreal. She told us about what she has to keep in mind while designing posters and commercials for products, and who the target audience is. They have to make their posters appeal to their audience, whether it’s young, middle aged, or older women. They have to keep in mind if they want to use models with long or short hair, or if they want to use a celebrity to advertise it more. Brands think of us, people, as just consumers. They just want to make sure that we buy the product. L’Oreal’s motto is “Because I’m worth it.” At the end of all of their commercials, someone says “Because I’m worth it” or “Because you’re worth it.” Martha talked about how L’Oreal, as well as many other companies, sometimes don’t advertise the product as they really are. If the ad is for mascara, sometimes they retouch the image, so that the woman’s lashes look even longer than they would originally look with the mascara. Martha said that she felt that it was bad to advertise a product inaccurately, and she wanted L’Oreal to stop doing it as much. She told us that there was a lawsuit against L’Oreal because their labels and ads weren’t always truthful. Since then L’Oreal has had to be more careful about what they say about their products.

Here’s an ad by L’Oreal

An interesting story that Martha told us about was when they had to retouch an image so that it would be unretouched. L’Oreal Paris filmed a commercial in France for mascara. The designers there retouched the model’s lashes to make them look even longer, which gives people a false image. When the commercial got to New York, they actually had to retouch the image to unretouch it, so that it would be legal. I thought this lawsuit was very important because it showed how much companies, like L’Oreal, as well as many others, haven’t been truthful to us. They retouch the images and show those to us, not what the products really do to you. Even if the information isn’t bad, we still have a right to know exactly what we’re buying.

This interview made me think about how much money people spend on beauty products to try to look more beautiful. Some might not spend as much if the results were shown accurately. Ads like the ones at L’Oreal can give artificial ideas of beauty. They make people think that they need all of this extra stuff so that they will be beautiful, and they don’t think about their personality and how what’s on the inside can make them beautiful.