CVS, one of the largest drug store chains in the United States, has announced that it will no longer use digitally altered photos of faces in its advertising and other marketing material for its beauty products. The company says all beauty photos will be clearly marked to indicate that they have not been manipulated.
The company introduced the “CVS Beauty Mark,” a watermark that will be used to highlight imagery that has not been materially altered. For this initiative, “materially altered” is defined by CVS as changing or enhancing a person’s shape, size, proportion, skin or eye color, wrinkles or any other individual characteristics. CVS says it will be working together with key brand partners and industry experts to develop specific guidelines in an effort to ensure consistency and transparency.
Manipulating faces has become easier in recent years, with advanced Photoshop features as well as programs such as Portrait Pro, which automates many corrections that can smooth out wrinkles, enlarge eyes, get rid of neck lines, remove zits. The results often look impossibly perfect.
As part of the initiative, CVS plans to help customers differentiate between unaltered and altered imagery. The CVS Beauty Mark will start to appear on material related to CVS-branded products starting in 2018, with all imagery (even for products sold but not made by CVS) going to non-altered by 2020. The company is working with many of the brands it sells to get them on board.
Calling it the CVS Beauty Mark Initiative, Helena Foulkes, President of CVS Pharmacy and Executive Vice President of CVS Health says the new policy is part of the company’s purpose of “helping people on a path to better health.” She goes on to say that “how women feel about themselves on the outside affects how they feel about themselves on the inside” and that the company has been listening to how both the media and their customers focus on body image.
“The connection between the propagation of unrealistic body images and negative health effects, especially in girls and young women, has been established,” Foulkes says in a press release. “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.”
CVS was the first major retailer to ban the sale of cigarettes at their stores, replacing them with displays promoting programs designed to help customers quit smoking, and the new beauty initiative is just another way the company is focusing on bettering their customers.
