![]() To further demonstrate this healthification, I have analysed the marketing language of skincare products, to observe the health language used to promote their sales. If fitness were only about health, weight and body shape would not enter the discussion. It’s much easier to sell a ‘blast fat in eight weeks’ book under the guise of generic fitness, which applies to everyone, than by openly admitting that it’s merely a beauty pressure that is being achieved through exercise. In fitness, healthification obscures the beauty pressure to look a particular way behind the general label of exercise and health. ![]() ![]() It’s easy to find exercises online that remove fat from undesirable parts of the body, tone muscles so the body is fit but lean and ‘sculpt’ body parts - and there is money to be made in pressuring people to aim for these bodies. Exercise is obviously vital for general health, but many people seek out fitness in ‘he pursuit of body transformation’, aiming for the bodies idealised by current beauty standards. While skincare is more obvious and marketable, the exercise industry also hides beauty standards in the language of health. Therefore, while skin may be an organ, so long as the skincare industry focuses on the most visible issues and parts of the body, the industry is cosmetic. All the same issues may exist on the skin between toes, but no one is trying to buy or sell products in cosmetics stores that will help resolve this. Skincare is a prime example because, while it is true that skin is an organ and these products will protect and replenish that organ, the products are sold to resolve the most cosmetic of skin issues - redness, dryness and flakiness. By overemphasising the health elements in beauty products, healthification is used by marketers to panic and pressure consumers into purchasing expensive and unnecessary products in order to achieve cosmetic perfection guised as ‘perfect health’. I refer to this process of coating the beauty industry in health marketing as healthification. This is most evident in products that straddle the line between both purposes. While it is undeniable that cosmetic and health concerns can overlap (such as antibiotics required to combat serious acne), too much of the beauty industry is hiding under the language of health to sell their products. In fact, this Clinique ad is merely an exemplification of a fairly insidious trend that has snuck into the beauty industry: packaging beauty in the bandages of health. In contrast, announcing that you have stopped moisturising is likely to be perceived as a cry for help. It exists in the way that makeup is (rightly) treated as optional and skippable. In another ad for the same product, the tagline ‘on’t call it makeup’, paired with the statistic that the foundation is ‘86% skincare formula’, makes clear that being considered skincare is the preferable marketing outcome.Įmilia Clarke is not the first person to proclaim this hierarchy. ‘This is skincare.’ There is clearly a hierarchy being promoted among these product types - the use of ‘just’ suggests that foundation is lesser, whereas the ad’s proclamation that the foundation is skincare places greater weight on this element of the product. ‘This isn’t just foundation’, promises Emilia Clarke, holding a bottle of Clinique’s new Clinical Foundation. Clinique has a new ad currently doing the rounds on Instagram.
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