As I get older, I’m becoming less tolerant of luxury make up brands who use photographs of women that have been excessively ‘retouched’.  Most recently, I saw one with the tagline ‘more beautiful today than at twenty’. Well of course she looks better than she did at twenty; they’d airbrushed her half to death!

There’s no way that by using any product that you’re going to look like the women in these pictures, and you wouldn’t want to. It’s not just the impossibly flawless skin; it’s that every bit of character has also been removed.  You’d stare at a person who looked like that, they wouldn’t look right.  We communicate using our faces and we’re not supposed to be expressionless.

Women know that these results aren’t achievable and this is only advertising.  But back they come, month after month, with product after product that gives the same airbrush-quality results.  Amazing isn’t it?  No matter how much research and development they do, or how many patents it’s got, it can’t make their models look any better than ‘photoshop’ perfect.  If I were in charge, I’d be having a word with research and development; because by now those women should be leaping out of the page to sell me face cream; but they’re not.  I’m more interested in which software they’re using and if it will get the skin tones in my holiday snaps just right.  Why bother going to all the faff of getting a fake tan, when you can ‘photoshop’ one on before you upload your snaps to Facebook?  No one will ever know.

But seriously, any other company would have to provide evidence that what they were claiming in a photograph was achievable; so why are cosmetics companies seemingly exempt?

When challenged one luxury make up brand responded by saying that these were "aspirational pictures". Yes, you too can aspire to have your face rendered completely characterless.  Expression and character are good things, so why do they want to remove the bits that make us who we are?  Without them, we’re no better than shop window mannequins.

It worries me that younger girls, not aware of the visual tricks employed to get you to buy these brands, may grow up with the idea that they’re not beautiful, because they don’t have flawless skin like models in the pictures do.

It’s all very well having the glossy advertising, but are these products worth the money? Does really expensive moisturiser work any better than the £10 pot of L’Oreal Youth Code that I use everyday?  Interestingly; having read an article in the March 2012 edition of Psychologies magazine, possibly not.  Apparently, what goes in to L’Oreal’s Youth Code is a less concentrated version of what goes into Lancôme’s Génifique, which retails at £55 (Lancôme is also owned by L’Oreal). Génefique promises results within 7 days, Youth Code within 28.  That’s fine by me; I don’t mind waiting a little longer for my ‘perfect skin.’