No beauty product can show its face these days without its 'science bit'. But are such scientific claims credible, asks Margaret McCartney
When I was growing up, the hard-sell in adverts was sex. Ladies lying in rippling fields, languidly toying with chocolate bars, men leaping through windows while clutching a box of Milk Tray. It was pretty steamy, if pretty harmless, but it worked. Sex sold. There was a bit of sort-of science about: Fairy Liquid gave your mother soft hands, nine out of 10 cats preferred a particular brand. But it was rather soft stuff.
These days, however, the new hard-sell is science. And hard science at that, or so one might innocently presume. Ever since Jennifer Aniston told us the "science bit" was coming up in a commercial for L'Oreal Elvive, there has been a dazzling proliferation of science in our adverts. "Pure extracts", "spring water concentrate", "unique amino complex" and "a new generation of ingredients" are the kind of thing we now expect to find in our shampoo/face cream/loaf of bread: curiously, "clinical tests" always seem to reveal that 93 per cent of women find said product of "proven effectiveness".
And if an advert says something is 93 per cent effective, that must be right, mustn't it? After all, you can't just go on telly and make up statistics, can you?
Well, no, you can't. This week the French cosmetics giant L'Oreal was forced by Britain's Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) to withdraw a major ad campaign after making claims for two products, Anti-Wrinkle De-Crease face cream and Perfect Slim anti-cellulite cream, that it couldn't back up scientifically. The TV ads, which starred Claudia Schiffer, claimed that 76 per cent of women had "visibly reduced expression lines" after using Anti-Wrinkle De-Crease, and that 71 per cent of women found that Perfect Slim "visibly reduced the appearance of cellulite". The ASA found there wasn't enough evidence to support either claim, and the ads will now have to be amended. In May, similarly, advertisements by Estée Lauder were also found to be misleading.
So do these companies simply lie? L'Oreal, which made more than €2 billion in profits last year, insists not. The company said it disagreed with the verdict and that any claims it makes for its products are "substantiated by scientific evidence and customer research".
Who to believe? What soon becomes clear is that even when a manufacturer is not, strictly speaking, telling an untruth in its advertising, the "science bits" it is telling you are highly unlikely to be the full story.
Take Pantene Pro-V, which has recently been telling us, via spreads in magazines and TV ads, that its Anti-Breakage Shampoo will lead to "up to 95 per cent less breakage in just 10 days". Small print at the bottom of the page tells us that testers looked at "brushing damage, shampoo and conditioner versus non-conditioning shampoo". This is presented as credible science, but credible science involves doing things in a certain way.
How many people, for example, took part in the trial? (Perfect Slim, the ASA found, was tested on just 48 women, meaning that the number of women who noticed a difference was in fact only 34.) Did the participants know what shampoo they were using or were they "blinded" to it, as they would have been in a serious trial, and as did not happen in the case of Perfect Slim? Did the company run a proper comparison of shampoo and conditioner of their brand against both types of product from another brand?
I asked one of Pantene's senior scientists how the tests were done. All methods related to this are commercially sensitive, said Dr Steve Sheil, adding he and his team tested 10 samples of hair, three times, with reproducible results. The results were "significant". But how significant can testing 10 hair samples three times be? Did he really think this was credible enough science to serve as the foundation for a major science-based advertising campaign?
"All the claims have to be cleared by the Broadcast Advertising Clearing Centre," Sheil said, and here he was quite right. Britain's BACC, which is funded by the advertisers themselves, approves adverts for television by vetting them in advance (it approved the contentious L'Oreal ads). It insists that claims made during television advertising must be substantiated, and it will refer to a body of scientific and medical consultants in contentious cases.
Even so, it's arguable that small studies of this kind, carried out in what amounts to secrecy, aren't much substantiation for anything. They provide a cloak of scientific credibility, but they don't undergo the analysis that occurs when science appears in the harsher world of scientific publications.
The way the research is conducted for cosmetics firms is also questionable. Take an advert for another L'Oreal product, Revitalift. In "clinical tests", according to the ad for the cream, of 40 women "93 per cent say their skin felt softer, and 79 per cent say their skin was firmer with each application". In 2004, L'Oreal spent €500 million on research and development, so you'd expect some really vigorous analysis - perhaps the use of a dummy cream or ordinary moisturiser to act as a control.
A scientific adviser for L'Oreal Paris, Benedicte de Villeneuve, says: "Carrying out a placebo-controlled test does not make much sense in our industry as a cosmetic product is a balanced and precise mixture of cosmetic ingredients and its effectiveness relies on this specific combination of ingredients."
Discovering the "truth" about hair breakage or skin firmness is not, granted, the stuff of life or death - and scientific truth is more often about revealing degrees of certainty than it is about finding rare absolutes. But rubbish science in face cream adverts may end up undermining the proper science we read about in the stories next to the adverts.