Life Done Right™

It takes a special marketer to refer to “these women” (over 50) as being “at harmony with themselves” so they can avail themselves of Lancaster’s new Differently Nutri-Dermo Skin. Got that: combine nutrition and dermatology and you get nutri-derm solutions to your anti-aging problems. In boxing a hook might get you knocked out; in cosmetics [...]

The next time you turn on the TV and see Heidi Klum, beware, she’s being paid by Guthy-Renker to hustle skin care products. Since the magic of skin care products is invisible, it’s pretty hard to communicate what exactly it is you’re buying. That’s why companies hire beautiful models. Somehow by buying the products you, [...]

Actor Clive Owen takes it on the chin for Lancome by offering up his endorsement services for their Age Fight product. This is an “anti-aging perfecting fluid.” If you are 30-40 years-old, then obviously you need an “anti oxidative stress shield to fight 1st lines day after day.” 92 percent of men experienced “energized [...]

Good news for those of you who are bald, have wrinkles, or a head of gray hair. These are not signs that your body is en route to a rapid decline and early death. Time to come up with some other excuse for not getting your lazy ass off the couch and exercising.
Baldness and Longevity

Dove is running a commercial that shows sexy older women in the buff asking the question: Too old to be in an anti-aging ad? Hey, for those of you who think this world is only for the young, check out the nude sexy! Who knew all you had to do was spin a woman on [...]

The days of growing old gracefully are over. Like Christmas and Valentine’s Day, the marketers and plastic surgeons have seen fit to make you feel inadequate if you don’t indulge your fears about the life-worn face that confronts you in the mirror every morning and buy a wrath of products to “fix” the problem. Welcome [...]

Magazines faces a real dilemma these days: publish or simply put everything online. A magazine survives based on whether they can get advertisers to pay for those full-page ads to sell you products you probably don’t need but make you feel better anyway.
Prevention magazine is the ideal Baby Boomer crib sheet. It offers all [...]

Do you feel more beautiful now than you did when you were, say, in your twenties? Sharon Stone thinks so…with a little help from Christian Dior’s Capture Totale. I’d say it has more to do with the money she pocketed for this ad in order to buy the $125 anti-aging serum from Dior. Who comes [...]

© Christopher Peterson
Fashion Week at Bryant Park offered an opportunity to view some of New York’s socialites as they entered the tents for designer shows. Here’s one…

The CIA is known for employing truth serums in order to get spies to divulge their secrets. The beauty industry has ripped a page from their interrogation manual in order to concoct an anti-aging serum made from Kukui nut oil and red algae. The Baby Boomer search for eternal youth goes on. No nut oil [...]

Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but according to Bobbi Brown it also requires one additional ingredient…you must be living! Why go under the knife once to combat signs of aging when you can spend money on cosmetic products every month. It’s the rent versus buy model of beauty being applied to [...]

Raquel Welch is the latest MAC Cosmetics’ beauty icon. Toss enough celebrities at the public and you’re bound to get some of them to buy your products. While the list of celebrities grows shorter, the desire to make a profit grows deeper. Raquel looks great though!
The purrrrrrfect pitch:
A limited edition colour collection created in collaboration [...]

The HBA is offering an Anti-Aging Conference in New York City at the Crown Plaza Hotel from March 21-22, 2006. This is the place to be if you want to tap into the growing obsession with Baby Boomers grasping to hang on to their youth.
The pitch:
An unparalleled forum, the Anti-Aging Conference will focus on the [...]

For those of you who inherited your grandmother’s perfume bottle collection, guard them with your life! Those babies may be worth serious money.

R. LALIQUE Perfume presentation, “Tresor de la Mer,” for Saks Fifth Avenue, c. 1936. Opalescent glass shell-form box, with clear and frosted glass pearl-form bottle, complete with original red velvet presentation box lined [...]

Clarifying. Age Defying. Replenishing. Firming. Anti-Aging. Skin Calming.
Wait a minute…skin calming. What the hell kind of new age phrasing is that? Borba knows. They have created a whole line of products that promote “healthy skin from within.” They have even made appearances on QVC, that bastion of hucksterism whose only restraints on fanciful come-on lines [...]

Beauty Junkies
Inside Our $15 Billion Obsession With Cosmetic Surgery
Written by Alex Kuczynski
Read an excerpt
Click here to see the author interviewed
A star writer for the New York Times Styles section captures the follies, frauds, and fanaticism that fuel the American pursuit of youth and beauty in a wickedly revealing excursion into the burgeoning business of cosmetic [...]

Add beauty packaging to the discussion of how to market to Baby Boomers. The disposable income of this group is so vast that it makes the search for oil around the world seem like a worthless effort in the desert. What makes for a good design? Here are two helpful hints:

If a model will be [...]

The road to Baby Boomer riches is filled with cosmetic potholes. Revlon, after ousting its CEO Jack Stahl and replacing him with David Kennedy, just announced they are discontinuing their Vital Radiance line. It’s always fun to read the reason why.
Here the failure of the brand is blamed on the 3-month window for a [...]

What’s your guess: does baldness influence the perceived age of an older man? Here’s a couple of researchers that raised the bucks to find out.
Background: Androgenetic alopecia is the most common type of hair loss in men, but little is known about the etiology of androgenetic alopecia in elderly men and its impact on perceived [...]

William Safire has picked up on the cosmetic industry’s use of the term, age-defying, to describe its new wonder products that make wrinkles seemingly vanish into old age heaven. Hucksters abound in every market. It’s no different than the grocery business gloming onto any word that suggests natural.
Take a glimpse at the future here, here [...]