Scientific findings that mislead consumers

by Margaret McCartney

Our adverts now come laden with a dazzling array of scientific claims from 'unique amino complexes' to 'revolutionary moisture formulas'. But what does any of it mean? Much suspect science goes into what we swallow, apply and absorb every day.

The new hard-sell in advertising these days is science. And properly hard science at that, or so one might innocently presume. Ever since Jennifer Aniston told us that the "science bit" was coming in a commercial for L'Oreal Elvive, there has been an increasingly dazzling proliferation of science in our adverts. "Pure extracts", "spring water concentrate", "unique amino complex" and "a new generation of ingredients" are the kind of thing we now expect to find in our shampoo/face cream/loaf of bread: curiously, "clinical tests" always seem to reveal that 93 per cent of women find said shampoo/face cream/loaf of bread of "proven effectiveness".

And if an advert says something is 93 per cent effective, that must be right, mustn't it? After all, you can't just go on telly and make up statistics, can you?

Well, no, you can't. The French cosmetics giant L'Oreal was forced by the Advertising Standards Authority to withdraw a major ad campaign after making claims for two products, Anti-Wrinkle De-Crease face cream and Perfect Slim anti-cellulite cream, that it couldn't back up scientifically.

The TV ads, which starred Claudia Schiffer, claimed that 76 per cent of women had "visibly reduced expression lines" after using Anti-Wrinkle De-Crease, and that 71 per cent of women found that Perfect Slim "visibly reduced the appearance of cellulite". The ASA found there wasn't enough evidence to support either claim, and the ads will now have to be amended. In May, similarly, advertisements by Est‚e Lauder were also found to be misleading.

So do these companies simply lie? L'Oreal, which made 1.4bn profit last year, insists not. In a statement the company said it disagreed with the verdict and that any claims it makes for its products are "substantiated by scientific evidence and customer research". Who to believe? What soon becomes clear is that even when a manufacturer is not, strictly speaking, telling an untruth in its advertising, the "science bits" its telling you are highly unlikely to be the full story.

Take Pantene Pro-V, which has recently been telling us, via shiny spreads in various magazines and TV ads, that its Anti-Breakage Shampoo, will lead to "up to 95 per centless breakage in just 10 days". Small print at the bottom of the page tells us that testers looked at "brushing damage, shampoo and conditioner versus non-conditioning shampoo".

This is presented as credible science, but credible science involves doing things in a certain way. How many people, for example, took part in the trial? Did the participants know what kind of shampoo they were using or were they "blinded" to it, as they would have been in a serious scientific trial? Did the company run a proper comparison of shampoo and conditioner of their brand against both types of product from another brand?

I decide to find out. After several phone calls over several days, I am put through to one of Pantene's senior scientists. How were the tests done, I ask. All methods related to this are commercially sensitive, Dr Steve Sheil says, but he does tell me that he and his team tested 10 samples of hair, three times, with reproducible results. The results were "significant". But how significant can testing 10 hair samples three times really be? "All the claims have to be cleared by the Broadcast Advertising Clearing Centre," he says, and here he is quite right.

A cloak of credibility

The BACC, which is funded by the advertisers themselves, approves adverts for television by vetting them before they make it on to our screens (it approved the contentious L'Oreal ads). It insists that claims made during television advertising must be substantiated, and it will refer to a body of scientific and medical consultants in contentious cases.

Even so, it's arguable that small studies of this kind, carried out in what amounts to secrecy, aren't much of substantiation for anything. They provide a cloak of scientific credibility, but they don't undergo the analysis that occurs when science appears in the harsher world of scientific publications. How is an ordinary consumer to find out what the research actually involved.

Claire Forbes is director of communications at the Advertising Standards Authority. She says that there are firm guidelines as to what can and cannot be claimed in advertising, but the ASA, with a staff of 100, has no legal standing to regulate advertising.

Staff look at all the major newspapers daily, but with an estimated 30m adverts printed every year in the UK, it is impossible for them to look at them all. Instead the authority relies on public complaints, 14,000 of which are made annually. Forbes cites the recent case of a slimming pill whose advertising was withdrawn after making claims that were found to be based on a study on just 44 people.

The ASA, after a complaint, decided that this was too small a study to be valid. "Talking generally, we may accept a small sample size as reasonable proof, but this would really depend on the statistical significance of whatever tests were done," Forbes says. "Conditional claims lead to a host of different claims, especially when 'modal verbs' are used. We might ask them to change 'can' to 'could' if they didn't have 100 per cent proof of the 'can'. But we would also expect them to hold proof relating to the 'could'."

But weasly verb tenses aren't the only problem. It's also the way the research is conducted. Take an advert for another L'Oreal product, Revitalift. In "clinical tests", according to the ad for the cream, of 40 women "93 per cent say their skin felt softer, and 79 per cent say their skin was firmer with each application".

In 2004, L'Oreal spent 340m on research and development, so you'd expect some really vigorous analysis perhaps the use of a dummy cream or ordinary moisturiser to act as a contro.

I ask Benedicte de Villeneuve, scientific advisor for L'Oreal Paris about this. "Carrying out a placebo-controlled test does not make much sense in our industry as a cosmetic product is a balanced and precise mixture of cosmetic ingredients and its effectiveness relies on this specific combination of ingredients," he emails in response.

But why can't they use some bog-standard emollient as a control, so that the consumer at least knows whether this product, or nappy cream, is better? Discovering the "truth" about hair breakage or skin firmness is not, granted, the stuff of life or death. In any case, scientific truth is more often about revealing degrees of certainty than it is about finding rare absolutes.

But rubbish science in face cream adverts may end up undermining the proper science we read about in the stories next to the adverts. And it is not only beauty products that use sort-of science to sell.

(The Guardian)