ASA Bans Olay Cream Ad for Being Misleading

With so many creams and lotions that promise women eternal youth – or the closest thing to it – via ads in the papers and on TV, it’s not so often that we see a watchdog ban one such commercial. Yet, it happens, and the Olay Regenerist cream has been the last “victim” to go down, after an ad aired in the UK comparing it with a much cheaper, less painful and much more convenient option to cosmetic injections, the British media is reporting.

According to the Daily Mail, the Olay ad was banned by the ASA (Advertising Standards Authority) after many customers filed complaints with the organization because they found it to be “misleading.” The TV spot showed beauty journalist Eve Cameron speaking about the face cream in very appraising terms, saying that women often asked her about what else could return the same results as cosmetic injections, to which she said the answer was Olay Regenerist.

“Women who aren’t ready for cosmetic injections constantly ask me to recommend a skin cream that really works. So I was excited when this study, revealed at the World Congress of Dermatology, showed that pentapeptides are effective in reducing the appearance of lines and wrinkles.” Cameron is saying in the now-banned commercial.

When several women filed complaints with the ASA asking for further evidence of the effectiveness of pentapeptides, the Authority decided that the ad itself was misleading and needed to be pulled off air. However, Procter and Gamble Ltd, which makes and distributes the Olay creams, was quick to defend it, telling the media that not for one second was the spot meant to draw a parallelism between the results of Regenerist and cosmetic injections, or put the two side by side for that matter.

This is not the first beauty ad to have been recently banned in the UK. At the beginning of January, Estee Lauder also came under heavy fire when an ad for the Tri-Aktiline Instant Deep Wrinkle Filler face cream was pulled off for making fake claims, as it said that women would “see wrinkles disappear instantly.”