Menstrual blood isn’t blue. Hair grows in all sorts of weird places. And arses can get very sweaty.
These are just a few realities of the human body. And they’re being increasingly reflected in the ads for personal hygiene and beauty products.
The latest is from Wilkinson Sword Intuition, the shaving brand for women, which this week unveiled ‘Any Hair, Anywhere’. The campaign is “a refreshing take on the category and embraces the messy, intimate and ridiculous realities of shaving as a woman”, says the brand – which claims to be “on a mission to connect with modern women through an honest portrayal of their relationships with body hair, wherever it might pop up”.
Hence authentic scenes of ladies trimming their eyebrows, upper lips, cheeks, armpits, bikini lines, bums, legs and toes. Never before has a UK TV ad featured so many pubes.
But they were to be expected. After all, the personal care space has worked for years to challenge unrealistic beauty and body standards.
Personal care gets ‘real’
Take, for instance, Dove’s ‘Real Beauty’ push, which kicked off in 2004, featuring regular women with diverse appearances. It’s still running.
“We believe in authentically representing our diverse community, including those who are often unseen and unheard,” says Dove. “That’s why we feature women of different ages, sizes, ethnicities, abilities, genders, hair colour, hair type and style.”
Then there was #YoursTruly, the 2016 L’Oréal Paris cosmetics push that featured 23 diverse brand ambassadors, including acid attack survivor Katie Piper and male make-up artist Gary Thompson (the first man to star in a mass-market cosmetics ad).
The following year Bodyform became the first maker of feminine care products to replace blue liquid with red ‘blood’ in a TV ad. Rival brands have since followed suit. Others have featured frank discussions of urine leakage.
In deodorant recently, the focus has been put on boobs. And butt cheeks. And balls. That’s thanks to Unilever and its Sure Whole Body Deo, which rolled out in January. Its series of adverts features a diverse cast of characters applying the product as slang terms for various body parts adorn the screen. Waggling rumps, jiggling knockers and flopping goolies are lovingly photographed.
Naturally, some people will balk at such content. That’s their problem. Hardly anyone wants to dwell on a stranger’s furry groin, but most accept bodies aren’t perfect – and portraying them as such is far more off-putting. It’s dishonest and potentially damaging to people’s body images.
But a spot of pearl-clutching does raise the question of how far is too far. Are personal hygiene and beauty ads in danger of sparking nationwide outrage in future? The answer is probably not. As long as the CAP Code is adhered to, and everyone keeps their undies on.
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