Nouveau Beauty questioned over misleading marketing claims, by ASA

10-Mar-2016 - Last updated on 10-Mar-2016 at 11:08 GMT

Marketing claims are scrutinised heavily in the cosmetics industry these days and cosmetics firm Nouveau Beauty is the latest to find itself on the receiving end of a telling off by a UK advertising watchdog after it was deemed to be making misleading claims.

Beauty firm CACI International complained that an advertorial for Nouveau Beauty made misleading skin claims, raising three specific issues with what was said:

“Nano-current comes with high medical credibility and clinically evidenced results” and “Muscle fibres are in fact elongated cells which will respond to nano-current in the same way as skin cells”;
that the A-Lift “stimulate[s] the release of the energy carrier ATP (adenosine triphosphate) to fuel cellular metabolism, function and renewal at the different levels of the skin”; and
“… can A-Lift nano-current outperform the staple micro-current machine we know and love? The answer is fundamentally yes”.

The complaints made questioned whether the claims made in the advertorial could be substantiated, with the Advertising Standards Authority siding with CACI, stating the ad must not appear again in its current form and that Nouveau Beauty need to ensure that it has robust documentary evidence to support efficacy and comparative claims in its advertising.

Providing evidence

When questioned about these three issues, Nouveau Beauty stated that the A-Lift machine used both micro-current as well as nano-current technology to improve the condition of skin.

It provided a first report demonstrating the benefits of the machine’s nano-current range and a second report, written by the company that created the device, providing details of a test, which it believed showed that the device emitted nano-current.

Nouveau Beauty also stated that the results of the first report it had provided substantiated the claim that the A-Lift “stimulate[s] the release of the energy carrier ATP (adenosine triphosphate) to fuel cellular metabolism, function and renewal at the different levels of the skin”.

Lastly, the company said that the device’s combined use of micro-current and nano-current technology provided two different levels of treatment, which it believed provided better results than a micro-current machine, and that the third claim challeneged was based on the author’s own experience of using the machine.

Despite this explanation, the ASA states that Nouveau Beauty has not provided an explanation as to what was meant by nano-current, along with evidence to show that the A-Lift machine used such technology.

“We considered that consumers would interpret the marketing claims as meaning that the technology used by the A-Lift machine had been scientifically proven to work in the manner described, having tested its effects through normal use in in-vivo studies using human subjects,” said a statement.

The evidence provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of nano-current technology was not deemed enough by the ASA, which said could mislead consumers and breached CAP Codes.