Cosmetics giant L’Oreal drew a lot of heat yesterday for their new Feria haircolor ad featuring a strangely white-looking BeyoncĂ©. (And the controversy hasn’t even mentioned that her straight blonde hair looks absolutely nothing like it used to.)
TMZ fanned the flames by polling its readers: “Is the ad a slap to Blacks?” Fifty-eight percent said yes.
So of course, L’Oreal had to do some immediate damage control, denying that her features or skin tone were retouched for the ad campaign.
O RLY? Because this would not be the first time L’Oreal has gone out of its way to make sure its hair products are being promoted by light-skinned people.
Last year, the company was found guilty of racial discrimination in France for hiring only white salesgirls to push its Garnier Fructis Style line of shampoo. Among the evidence:
In July 2000, a fax detailing the profile of hostesses sought by L’OrĂ©al stipulated women should be 18 to 22, size 38-42 (UK size 10-14) and “BBR”, the initials for bleu, blanc, rouge, the colours of the French flag. Prosecutors argued that BBR, a shorthand used by the far right, was also a well-known code among employers to mean “white” French people and not those of north African, African and Asian backgrounds.
After the ruling, the company said in a statement, “We believe that diversity and difference are a source of richness and we do not tolerate any form of racism or discrimination.” Except, I guess, when you have a highly successful spokeswoman whose skin is just too dark.
Not only does the person on the right not look black, it doesn’t even look like Beyonce. If I hadn’t been told I wouldn’t have even known.
Since tonight is my “blonde night” maybe I’ll just take my business elsewhere! Take that L’Oreal!
Beyonce is too dark?? Most models have darker tans.
You know - for a lot of years I bought into the hype that Americans are somehow the most backward and racist people on Earth. Then I started traveling. For all the crap we get, I would go out on a limb and say the problems of race and ethnicity are just as bad if not worse in many European countries. France is awful about it’s North African immigrants (not that I can really blame them, a whole bunch of pissed off Muslims moving to my country would freak me out too).
What REALLY shocked me was that 60 years after the Holocaust, the Jews are still probably the most hated minority in Europe, and a lot of people don’t even try to mask their hatred of them. Guess that’s why they have all those hate speech laws over there - they need them more.
Photoshopping is the true evil here.
jj when I saw the pic, I thought the same thing. It looks like the genius they hired retouched the whole photo instead of just the hair.
Is this a slight to blacks? No.
If nothing else I doubt it was intentional to make her “whiter”, ’cause nobody is dumb enough to actually make that decision (I hope). But it does seem like the usual photoshop wankery- when you’re used to the models not looking like themselves, it could probably be easy to take it way too far.
This is, however, way too far. What’s the point if you’re going to make her look like a Mariah Carey impersonator?
I didn’t think that looked like Beyonce either! They overtouched her, not just in skin tone but her whole face!
Apparently L’Oreal not only doesn’t like its reps to be too dark, but not too skinny or too full-figured either.
Let’s remember who is buying L’Oreal products; are they African-Americans? I don’t think so.They are simply targeting their public, that’s all. How many “Ethnic” products have whites people on their packaging?
Toubrouk - I agree with you in theory, but if that’s the case, why hire an ‘ethnic’ in the first place? Why hire a black person and whiten them up, instead of just hiring a white person to begin with?
Watching 10 minutes of latin American TV or a short conversation with european who crudely oversimplify everything will cure anyone of the notion that Americans are some uniquely racist and lead you directly to the conclusion that we’re uniquely non-racial in our outlook.
I also don’t think Beyonce minds all this ‘hoopla’ as she stands to make a bundle
Apropos of nothing: I have never been able to decide whether I find her really attractive or not. One time I see her on TV or in print, and I think “Wow!” The next time, I think, “eh…”
This the reverse of what Time magazine did when it darkened O.J. Simpson’s mugshot for its cover.
I believe in truth-in-advertising. All retouched photos should clearly state that the photo has been retouched and how it was retouched (e.g., wrinkles removed, nose straightened, skin color).
Anybody out there ever use an actual camera with flash? Have you ever heard of lighting? Makeup?
When you change hair colour that drastically, it also requires a change in makeup shades. This doesn’t mean just black people, but all of us. I am a fairly pasty pale person, and have cosmetic shades for different times of the year/shades of blonde in my hair.
As for the lighting, take a look at the 2 pix. It’s quite apparent that the shot on the right with the lighter hair has a different exposure, simply by comparing the planes on the face. This is a common effect, and has nothing to do with the phot subject being black, but simply to create a look.
Sheesh. Not everything is a racist ploy of some kind.
when i saw that picture of beyonce on the right a few days ago, i thought “who the hell is this? it isnt beyonce!”
Dagny Taggart-
Yep, used a camera with flash. Actually I spend a lot of time on sets, with film lighting, cameras, makeup etc. And you know what? Yes, there is a certain amount of makeup-to-hair work that needs to be done.
BUT any freshman year film student knows how to do makeup and light someone so that they look like themselves. Are you suggesting that professional photogs couldn’t figure out how to take a picture of Beyonce so that she looked like herself? That’s kinda the point of hiring a celebrity to endorse your product- you better make damn sure they’re recognizable no matter how much makeup and lighting they’re under.
It might not be racism, but it’s definitely a bad decision. They went for a “look” alright, but it wasn’t an accident of lighting and makeup. They made her look significantly different, and you cannot seriously think it just accidentally happened. Professional makeup is not the same as the makeup you wear year round- what you put on someone to balance out those hot lights is NOT what you’d wear on the street. Lights do wash you out, so they put on darker makeup. And filter the lights. And use reflectors. And adjust it later if you still washed them out.
Yeah, I’m no photographer, but there has to be a way to light and shoot her so she doesn’t look Scandinavian.
There’s also the more obvious argument- if the pale makeup is to make her look “right” with such blond hair, perhaps the blond hair was a mistake. Again, it’s a style choice, and a dumb one. I would die laughing if a L’oreal exec actually said “let’s hire a celeb to endorse this, give her totally different hair…oh, wait, her skin looks odds with that hair, fix her skin color so she doesn’t look mismatched. Excellent, she looks like a completely different person. Glad we hired a celebrity for that.” It’s like a L’oreal extreme makeover for people who didn’t need it.
But it’s definitely not an “oops, lighting was too harsh” mistake.
Black girls,black girls what cha gonna do? Whatcha gonna do when they bust your truth?He,he,he,he,he! Ya, Beyonce is light-skin but she still has afro hair, not white-texture curlz or even tiny black peoplez texture curlz.Her motherz hair is still kinda nappy even thu her mother not Beyonce iz half white! So who iz this Beyonce trying to fool, this fake, this front. Also, as i said earlier,Beyonce iz light skin but not as light skin as she is shown to be. Put all this sh.. together, Beyonce is trying to look wjite.Lightening skin, fake white hair texture, blonde hair.Beyonce you aint no white California girl.
I’m confused here…99.9% of all the hair we see on Beyonce have been WEAVES and WIGS.
Hello. I have a slightly different take on this. I don’t think L’Oréal lightened Beyoncé via Photoshop. If I’m wrong, I’ll be the first to get on your boycott bandwagon. You’re cordially invited to read my perspective and comment. Thank you.
HighJive-
Yeah, your slightly different take sounds pretty much like what a lot of us actually were saying. That is wasn’t racism, that it was stupidly failing to realize that they made her look completely unlike herself.
By the way, you can’t pull a “if I’m wrong, I’ll be the first to get on your boycott bandwagon” if nobody ever said anything about boycotting. Defensive, much?
I read your blog post, and it seems your on the same page on the whole “failing to compensate for lights” thing as has been drifting on these comments, although from my set experience I can still say that you can and SHOULD use on-site makeup to compensate for light blow-out. That this wasn’t done and wasn’t touched up in photoshop later is odd, considering we’re still dealing with professional photogs here and amateurs know better than that.
That’s the part that makes this weird- there’s no way they don’t know how to compensate for the most common of all glamor shot problems. Why they didn’t do what’s pretty dang basic to the business remains to be determined, but I still don’t buy the idea that this was an “oops.” Maybe you’re right on one thing- they’re used to dealing with a “whiter” idea of beauty, and didn’t even recognize this as an issue because she’s still pretty, just really not looking like herself. But that still sounds odd to me.
@”A natural blonde white girl”:
Your closing statement, “Beyonce you aint no white California girl.” is ridiculous. Show us where she claimed to be. Go on, I’m waiting for it, horrible grammar and spelling and all.
There appears to be more going on there than just the shading. The “laugh lines” around her cheeks have been completely smoothed out and her lower lip is much fuller in the retouched (?) photo. What’s with that?
a natural blonde white girl:
You’re an idiot…
@ Bald Tires- what’s going on is the usual photoshopping at least as far as the fuller lips, laugh lines etc are concerned, I’d assume. There’s no way this thing wasn’t subjected to the usual retouching, even if they didn’t use the old digital makeup to change her actual skin tone.
Regardless of whether it’s race motivated or not, everybody has to remember that they don’t click a photo and print out the ad. These things go through more time and retouching than I want to think about. From choosing the makeup and setup, to setting the lights, to actually taking the photo and then some, this is a meticulous process. The final image they get is very, very controlled. Regardless of why they want to get a certain “look”, they are definitely in control of what they get. Why they made her look different is a mystery to me, but anybody who thinks that they weren’t in complete control of the final result hasn’t spent any time in advertising. They know how to do this, folks.
Incidentally, I asked a professional photog about the “flash washed her out” theory and…no go on that one. If the flash washed her out to that degree, you’d notice that her eyebrows, the dark parts of her eyes, the dress, etc, would all look unnaturally lightened. Not that L’Oreal would have let a flash error show in a final ad, but just an FYI on how this works.