To wit, to woo
Do humour and beauty mix? Steve Gibbons sees no reason why they shouldn’t and every reason why they should go together more often
Just why is it that so much beauty communication is devoid of either wit or humour? You may disagree with the basic premise of the question, or you may feel, as a post-feminist but not yet fully reconstructed male colleague of mine answered: “women don’t respond to humour in the way men do [and because the majority of beauty communication is targeted at women], this explains why”.
The D&AD Annual (the book that catalogues the ‘Oscars’ of the design and advertising world’s best work) bristles with humour – examples from the drinks, motor, technology and financial services sectors abound – but alas through all 600 pages of the latest book there are very few beauty examples.
Any analysis of humour is tricky, just as an attempt to explain a joke so often renders its humour impotent. An explained joke has all the charm of the learned Professor Scully attempting to define a smile by describing it as “the drawing back and slight lifting of the corners of the mouth, which partially uncover the teeth; the curving of the naso-labial furrow...” etc etc – I won’t go on.
So I know I’m on difficult ground here, both with what might be considered a stereotypical male response to women and humour, and an attempt to dissect humour to understand why the language of beauty is so devoid of laughs, or even smiles.
All of the 25 beauty ads in this month’s Vogue follow exactly the same basic formula: a highly styled flawlessly beautiful woman, a product shot, a piece about the science (obligatory for L’Oréal) and, if you’re lucky, a lame headline. Spreads almost always have the girl on the left and the product, science and lame headline on the right. So not only a lack of humour or wit but also a consistently predictable layout, irrespective of the brand. Cover up the logo and the packaging and you’d be hard pressed to spot one brand from another. Even the approach of Clinique – a brand that originally broke the mould by using Irving Penn’s clean stark lines with clever graphic ideas focused solely on the product and espousing the usual dewy fresh models – has become something of a cliché. To give the company credit Clinique still uses the same photographic styling and product focus, but I feel it has lost some of the wit that at one time you would look out for in its ads.
Where is it written that beauty advertising has to be dull and humourless?
OK, I accept that there’s an enormous amount of craft skill that goes into creating the beauty ads that we see: the creative direction, the hairdresser, the make-up artist, the photographer, the retoucher etc. But while these are all (obviously admirable) craft skills, so many beauty ads just feel creatively hollow.
This is as evident on TV as it is in press advertising. I read recently that Fran Lebowitz, the formidable American female comic believes that “the cultural values [of humour] are male; for a woman to say a man is funny is the equivalent of a man saying that a woman is pretty”. Christopher Hitchens, who wrote the piece, takes the view that men invest more in humour than women because they are otherwise somewhat badly equipped to attract women, whereas women have no corresponding need when it comes to attracting a male.
Whether you accept this viewpoint or not, what it also suggests is that women are in fact very receptive to humour, so why not communicate with them using this extraordinarily powerful tool?
In her book on wit in design (and it could equally apply to advertising and other areas of communication) Beryl McAlone writes that “wit first entices the reader to spend time on the communication, and then helps the message linger in the memory” and “wit invites participation because it asks the reader or viewer to take part in the communication of the idea”. She goes on to explain (and I paraphrase) that good communication is a skillful, delicate and difficult thing to do – particularly where the pressure of the client tends to favour the ‘explicit’, the ‘unambiguous’, and the ‘message that just can’t fail to be understood’.
But of course the ‘explicit’ and the ‘unambiguous’ shut out the recipient, while wit always asks for a contribution from the message’s receiver.
There are some beauty brands that are using wit. The Aussie hair care brand with its self-effacing copy for instance, or the brand Soap & Glory that revels in its use of (often very risqué) puns and pastiche retro/vintage graphics. Retailers like Boots and Superdrug have also been very open to using wit in both their packaging and advertising. But for the most part the power of a really witty and engaging idea is passed over for the brilliantly styled but soulless beauty communications we mostly see.
It must undoubtedly be a massive opportunity for a beauty brand that’s brave enough to break the conventions that seem to so suffocate much of beauty communications.
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