Is L'Oreal doing all white with their advertisments?

L’Oreal has been accused of whitening not only Beyonce Knowle’s hair for an ad, but also her skin colour which is said it to have been several shades lighter. Beyonce Knowle’s is getting 4.7 million over 5 years of working with L’Oreal, in which she is only required to work 10 of those days of the year. So why would L’Oreal pay that much money for a well known celebrity only to alter her appearance? It may be possible that L’Oreal may have thought that the lighter colour would look better on someone with a lighter face, and obviously it’s still easy to distinguish the celebrity therefore it is possible that they had in fact altered the skin tone. The company has been caught before when they claimed that their mascara lengthened lashes when the model Penelope Cruz, in fact were false ones for the commercial. Due to being caught for false advertising before makes it harder for people to believe that they did not in fact lighten Knowle’s skin tone. Yet other reasons such as lack of sun, a different shade of makeup or the lighting of the room may also have altered Knowle’s skin colour, after all who’s to say that a girl’s skin colour looks the same in every photo?

Source:
Glaister, D 2008, L’Oreal denies ‘whitening’ Beyonce Knowle’s skin in cosmetics ad, Guardian, UK