New ways of talking about beauty

Skin Peace Pledge wants to rid the world of the language that causes low self-esteem in women.
In this opinion piece, Julie Curphey, Marketing Director at Blis Technologies, calls for an end to the way the beauty industry applies unrealistic expectations to women. Blis Technologies is the parent brand of the new skin care company, Unconditional Skincare Co.

We all know the messages the beauty industry sends to women about their skin: too dry, too oily, too sensitive, too red, too wrinkled, too freckled, not light enough. This is how women have been conditioned to think about their skin for decades.

One in two women interviewed for the Skin Confidence Survey said she felt bombarded with unrealistic beauty messages. One in three people said these messages affected their self-esteem.

The quantitative study, undertaken this year by Unconditional Skincare Co, interviewed 600 New Zealand women between the ages of 20 and 44 and revealed the relationship between beauty messages in advertising and women’s self-esteem. This is one of the first quantitative surveys to focus on understanding the impact of messaging instead of just advertising imagery.

We’ve seen pretty clearly that women are fed up with being told their skin is a problem. They feel the constant pressure to live up to unrealistic beauty expectations, backed by society and proliferated in advertising, social media, and beauty posts.

In our research, one in two women surveyed said they felt compelled to look a certain way.

These expectations imply that women must correct or remove natural features, such as acne spots, redness, or wrinkles. They are reinforced by the language used by the skin care industry – calling the skin “good” or “bad” or “problematic skin” – and by advertising messages suggesting that women “fix” the skin to. problems or to “banish” traits with “miracle cures”.

As a New Zealand skincare brand, Unconditional Skincare Co rejects unrealistic beauty messages that make women wonder if their skin is unworthy in one way or another, and hope we can achieve “skin peace” for all.

But it’s not just a social mission for us; it comes from the science behind our product. Our live probiotic, BLIS Q24®, works with your skin; it appears to balance the skin microbiome, helping your skin to perform at its best. It goes against a lot of things women have been conditioned to believe about “skin types” and “problem skin”.

We believe that the skin is not “good” or “bad”, but simply unbalanced. This balance is the goal of BLIS Q24®, which was discovered and commercialized by our team of pioneering scientists at Blis Technologies in Dunedin.

We didn’t just want to have an impact at the product level if we could have a more meaningful effect on how women think about their skin. So, we encourage them to tell us about the unrealistic beauty language that bothers them the most and that they would like to break free from.

We call it the Skin Peace Pledge, a commitment to a new way of talking about skin and beauty, without the negative impacts on women’s self-esteem. The engagement will inform a set of standards that we commit to as a brand – and we hope they will spark discussions at the influencer and industry level as well, helping to create broader change.

Once we’ve put the messages together, we’ll work with a psychologist to create the standards that underpin our Skin Peace Pledge – turning them into a set of best practices on how we, as a brand, will talk about the women’s skin.

So far, contributions to the Skin Peace Pledge have included these comments from women:

At Unconditional Skincare Co, we are passionate about building a brand that helps women feel confident about their skin and that’s why the Skin Peace Pledge is so important to us. We know that together we can dramatically improve how women think about their skin.

To learn more about the Skin Peace Pledge or to contribute unrealistic skin care messages you want to see changed, visit skinpeacepledge.com