Potential Problems With Beauty Product Consumer Claims

We have all seen many a product boasting words like "improves skin texture", "shrinks the appearance of pores" , or "reduces fine lines and wrinkles" spoken in ads or even printed on the packaging of our products. More often than not, these selling claims are taken from consumer studies, which consist of a sampling of people agreeing to try and test and product to report back on or answer a survey about their experience. While the information from these trials can be somewhat helpful to the consumer in trying to decide if a product could be right for them, it can can also be potentially misleading in some ways.

Little (if any) Scientific Backup: Though there are plenty of products out there that are laboratory-tested before they are brought to market, the vast majority of claims of products are sourced from consumer perception studies that often have no technical, objective, or numerical measurement. Instead, many claims -- and the survey questions asked to formulate the eventual claims-- ask solely about how the person feels about a product or what they perceive the changes in their appearance to be after using a product. Even though the most important thing in using beauty products is how they make us feel about ourselves, perceptions can be widely influenced and very vastly from person to person, especially with each individual starting from a different baseline of concern or need that they are hoping for the product to address. For example, a person who is a 20-year-old might be surveyed about their experience about a hydrating serum and say that they saw an improvement in hydration, and an 80-year-old trying the same serum may say that they too saw an improvement, but there's no way to know how much an improvement they saw and if there is the same, measurable result across their experiences and those of a range of ages and skin types.

Unavoidable Expectations: When learning about a product, it is very hard to not develop some kind of preconceived notion about how that product will perform positively or negatively, even before ever applying it. Though some beauty trials are randomized and some even use a placebo where some participants get the actual product, while others get water or some other neutral substance, the experience a person has with a product may be unduly colored by his or her prejudgment of what they expect to see from it and may reflect back in the way they report back when survey results are taken.

The Way Questions Could Be Written: So often on product claims, there will be words not just pertaining to the type of result itself, but also words describing the type of result such as a significant improvement in hair breakage or a dramatically volumized lash. If these adjectives also so happen to be put into the question on the survey, it could automatically skew the consumer feedback. Going back to the example of the hydrating serum as an example, if the 20-year-old is made to answer if the serum provided significant hydration to her skin and the survey only allows her to check "yes" or "no", how is she to respond if she feels she did receive some improvement in hydration but wouldn't necessarily say it was significant? Either way, she must choose an answer that may not accurately reflect her experience. Therefore, the feedback that is factored into the statistics compiled in the study will not give the full picture and will leave the study flawed. In fact, the language used in and of itself is probably designed to inflate the study and inflate the claims on purpose to make the product sound even more groundbreaking, extraordinary, exclusive, and sellable. True the particular consumer surveyed may agree or disagree with the general idea of the question, but there is no way to verify if their responses match the enthusiasm or the strength of the claim being presented.

When examining, consumer reports, marketing claims and surveys in further depth, it becomes trickier to discern the exact validity of the results and facts as stated, This just simply goes to show that the only way to truly know if a product will be for you all that it claims to be is to test it out yourself. That said, things like product descriptions, statistics, marketing buzzwords, and even reviews can all be helpful aides in helping you to decide which products may and may not be of interest and worth your experiment. It is just to important to remember that all not feedback may be as clear and straightforward as it seems.