CVS Will No Longer Photoshop Its Beauty Ads
Photoshop is no secret of the beauty industry, yet body positivity activists have put their finger on one certainty: Being bombarded with digitally altered images effects our perceptions of ourselves. Now, CVS Pharmacy is rolling out an initiative to bring a reality check to the advertising industry.
CVS just announced it’s putting new standards in place for how it alters beauty imagery used in its stores, social media, and ads. On top of those guidelines, it’s rolling out the CVS Beauty Mark, a watermark that will indicate images that haven’t been digitally altered, which it’s defining as “changing or enhancing a person’s shape, size, proportion, skin or eye color, wrinkles or any other individual characteristics.”
We’ve seen similar initiatives from fashion brands like Aerie, Target, Asos, and Missguided, but Photoshop still pervades beauty advertising.
“As a woman, mother and president of a retail business whose customers predominantly are women, I realize we have a responsibility to think about the messages we send to the customers we reach each day,” Helena Foulkes, President of CVS Pharmacy and Executive Vice President, CVS Health, said in a press release. “The connection between the propagation of unrealistic body images and negative health effects, especially in girls and young women, has been established. As a purpose-led company, we strive to do our best to assure all of the messages we are sending to our customers reflect our purpose of helping people on their path to better health.”
For now, the Beauty Mark (pictured in the right corner at top) will be limited to only CVS-created imagery. But execs are working with other drugstore beauty brands and industry experts to develop retouching guidelines, with a goal of across-the-board consistency and transparency. The watermarked imagery will start to show up in CVS stores this year, and by 2020, it’s aiming for all ads from other brands to follow suit.
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