Cult Beauty Launches Body Positive Campaign, Says ‘No’ to Airbrushing
LONDON — Cult Beauty, which built its name on selling high-performance brands and products with a loyal following, is taking a stand against airbrushing and in favor of young people’s mental health.
The beauty e-commerce site, which launched in 2007 and is owned by THG, has unveiled a campaign to eliminate retouched photos from its products and materials.
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It is also urging the wider U.K. beauty industry to support a parliamentary bill that would make it mandatory to declare when an image has been digitally altered to enhance a model’s face or body.
Cult’s campaign, “Can’t (Re)Touch This,” is aimed at reducing the number of airbrushed model images “amid an epidemic of eating disorders and mental health problems among young people.”
The brand has written to British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak (a father of two school-age girls) demanding tough new laws regulating the use of enhanced body images.
“Digital platforms have fueled an epidemic of anxiety and eating disorders among women and men alike by promoting exaggerated body shape and altered skin tones,” Cult Beauty said.
It added that the number of children being treated for eating disorders on pediatric wards in the U.K. has “more than doubled” over the last three years.
A recent report by the Mental Health Foundation, a U.K. charity, found that 35 percent of adults and 31 percent of teenagers surveyed felt “ashamed or depressed” because of their body image.
Cult Beauty is making a slew of changes, such as putting restrictions on retouching imagery photographed by its creatives. The company is also devising a new labeling system for the brand’s digital media and social channels, marking its images as “un(re)touched.”
It is also planning to create an additional labeling system for third-party, brand partner and influencer images hosted on its site and on social channels so that it’s clear all images supplied by Cult Beauty have not been retouched.
The company has beefed up its guidelines to ensure that diversity and inclusion sit at the forefront of its branding, and said it will display visuals that represent people of all shapes, sizes and colors.
Cult Beauty is reviewing the language and copywriting guidelines “to reframe the flaws that the industry has historically vilified.”
In an open letter to the British government cosigned by Mental Health U.K., Cult Beauty’s managing director Francesca Elliott is urging government ministers to back the proposed new laws.
“As a society, we’ve celebrated thinness, youth and flawlessness — elevating certain attributes while vilifying everything beyond the strict parameters of ‘perfect,'” the letter reads.
“Spots, wrinkles, cellulite, body hair — these are just examples of normal things that have been airbrushed out of ads and model images for decades — meaning to be ‘beautiful’ we have had to reject the reality of our bodies, and adapt to a mold that wasn’t made for us,” Elliott writes.
The company is supporting a parliamentary bill proposed by member of Parliament Dr. Luke Evans, which would make it mandatory for all companies to declare when an image has been digitally tweaked to enhance body proportions. The Digitally Altered Body Images Bill is currently before Parliament.
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