Fashion and beauty adverts leave 9 in 10 older women cold

ARE you sick of being bombarded by adverts featuring stick-thin twentysomethings you haven’t resembled for decades?

Well don’t worry – you’re not alone. For a study has found that nine out of ten women aged 40 to 89 feel ignored by mainstream fashion and beauty adverts.

The research shows that 91 per cent of them said they are inaccurately and insufficiently represented – or often ignored altogether – by the adverts they see on TV, online and in print.

And 97 per cent said they wanted to see a greater number of older models or celebrities routinely used in such advertising.

Last year, research showed the over-50s have become the biggest buyers of beauty products in the UK.

The boom has been put down to cosmetic companies such as L’Oreal and NARS taking on older stars such as Dame Helen Mirren, 70, and Jane Fonda, 78, to sell their products. But despite such appointments, the majority of models for fashion and beauty brands remain under 50.

Over the years Monsoon, a typical high street fashion chain for middle aged and older women, has featured the likes of Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, 29, Alessandra Ambrosio, 35, Sophie Ellis-Bextor, 37, and Helena Christensen, 47, in its campaigns.

A number of other British labels aimed at older women such as Hobbs, Jaeger, Jigsaw, East and Joules also use fresh-faced younger women to model their clothes.

The study by the London College of Fashion asked more than 500 women about their views on beauty products aimed at their age group.

Many pointed out that older women only tend to be shown in adverts for products with negative stereotypes of old age, such as incontinence pads, stairlifts or hearing aids.

The majority of those surveyed also said they did not approve of the fact that models were often used who are younger than the age group they were supposed to be portraying. And though beauty adverts often suggest that women aspire to eternal youth, the results showed that most women instead use such products to feel happy about their appearance.

When asked why they wear makeup, 53 per cent of the women said they wear it to ‘feel good’, while just 2.8 per cent wear it to ‘look younger’.

Tricia Cusden, 68, founder of makeup brand Look Fabulous Forever, which commissioned the study, stressed that older women often feel invisible in the beauty and fashion advertising world.

She said: ‘When I set up the brand at the age of 65, I had a hunch there would be a lot of older women who felt similar to me – ignored and overlooked by the beauty industry.

‘This hunch has been confirmed, not only by the results of this research, but by the success our brand has had with its positive pro-age message. The survey shows that there is a mismatch between how older women see themselves and how the advertising industry speaks to us.’

At the time of the study, women over 45 accounted for 58.14 per cent of the beauty market, while the over-60s were behind a quarter of all beauty sales in Britain – more than double that of a decade before. Total average expenditure on cosmetic products for women aged 50 to 70 reached £43,556 in April 2015, making this age group the biggest spenders for the first time.