In our opinion, the world of beauty advertising is always pushing the limits of believability, what with CGI tarantula eyelashes, over-photoshopped models, and hair so "long and billowing" that it could probably strangle us all. We're used to being a little cynical when it comes to these ads, but when we spotted this crazy skin-care campaign from the '50s, we truly could not believe our eyes.
In this commercial for Dorothy Gray Cosmetics Cold Cream, the company boasts of a lab test in which dirt was made to be "just radioactive enough" before being applied to a model's face, all in the name of testing the cleansing properties of the cold cream used to remove said dirt. Um, excuse us? Just radioactive enough? On her face? We're all for proving that your product actually works, but not at the risk of the health of those people involved with the testing. Also, if they did this to a human, WTF were they doing to animals back then. We shudder to think.
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We want to believe that the company didn't realize at the time that (hello?!) radiation is bad for you, but the fact that they intentionally try to minimize how radioactive the dirt was makes us think that they knew that what they were doing was potentially harmful. So, essentially, they're trying to promote skin cleansing by burning the models' complexion with radiation treatment. Nice. It may be massively harmful, but hey, her skin is squeaky clean, right?
What we'd like to see is how the skin of this poor beauty pioneer looks now, after being subjected to irradiated dirt. We're guessing no amount of Dorothy Gray Cold Cream is going to be able to fix that.