You have to wonder about beauty advertising, and why we choose to pay any attention to it. We all know it’s all nonsense, we know most of the products don’t do what they say they will and we know they won’t make us look like the beautiful celebrities whose faces adorn our TV screens. And yet still we buy the products, still we live in hope that this next one will be the one that really will give us the softest skin, the shiniest hair or the longest lashes – we do it because we want to believe.

An advert for Olay’s Regenerist anti-aging facial cream got banned last week. It wasn’t offensive or rude, but it was deemed to be misleading as it quoted some scientific data which the powers-that-be thought we mere mortals might take the wrong way. The advert features a beauty expert saying that pentapeptides (an ingredient of Regenerist) had been found to be effective in reducing the appearance of wrinkles by the World Congress of Dermatology, and apparently this is misleading as many of us won’t know what the WCD is.

I suppose it’s a good point, but I really don’t see what is any worse about this advert than a hundred others which show models with false lashes advertising mascara or a perfectly airbrushed twenty-something advertising wrinkle cream. I doubt anyone has claimed the Herbal Essences advert which shows the new design of bottles growing from a tree in the rainforest is misleading. Or that anyone thought that washing their hair with Pantene would make them suddenly able to play the piano as well as Myleene Klass. All beauty adverts are nonsense, that’s pretty much the point. It just seems a little strange that when an advert actually tries to state a few facts, they get banned for it.

It’s not as if sales of Regenerist or any other Olay products will be affected at all. No, we’re not going to stop buying beauty products, because we want so much to believe that they will work. Whether we’re looking for perfect skin courtesy of Eve Lom or Aesop, or dramatic makeup and nails from Mac or OPI, we’ve always listened to the nonsense and we always will.