Читать книгу Eyes Wide Open: How to Make Smart Decisions in a Confusing World - Noreena Hertz - Страница 29

This is something the marketing industry knows all too well.

Flick through any women’s magazine, and choose just a few select turns of phrase from the glossy adverts that dominate its pages.

How about Garnier’s ‘Dark Spot Corrector’ – I definitely don’t want to be caught out with any ‘dark spots’ – got to add that to my shopping list.

Then there’s Lancôme’s ‘Cell Defence’: not only does it ‘fight ageing’, it also ‘fights oxidation’ – not sure exactly what that is, but if it needs fighting it must be bad. One of those too, please.

This sounds particularly good – Estée Lauder has just launched a ‘youth infusing serum’ for eyes – huge relief, my eyes could do with some youth infusion; so yes please, I’ll take some of that as well.

The language advertisers use to play on women’s latent insecurities today may not be as extreme as it was back in the 1960s – a 1969 advert for Guerlain anti-ageing cream was headlined ‘Are you going to crack up before you’re 45?’2 – nice! But they’re still doing a pretty good job of zooming in on women’s fears by reminding us in slightly more subtle ways of what we are not and can never really be – all with a few carefully selected words.

I know, of course, at an intellectual level that this is what they are doing. I know that ‘youth’ is not a chemical property that can be ‘infused’, and that Dior’s pledge to combine ‘a scientific breakthrough’ and ‘precious nature’ in a bottle of ‘Capture Totale’ is total nonsense. Yet I fall for their combination of fear-mongering and pseudo-scientific babble disturbingly frequently, and add yet another solution-promising beauty cream to my already over-full bathroom cabinet.

This is because our unconscious minds can lead us to make choices that our rational selves would never countenance. It’s not just at the beauty counter that this can happen. As we’ll see time and time again in this chapter, similar responses to this kind of emotive wordsmithery play out in an extraordinary range of contexts, including those with much more disturbing consequences.

If you’re not yet convinced that you need to keep your eyes wide open, this chapter should help to persuade you.