Fitness lies: toning skin cream

The lotion and salve / cream industry is absolutely massive and in order to continue to sell their products, manufacturers need to constantly evolve to entice new purchases. If they were honest and simply said that it makes your hands feel greasy, no one would buy the stuff (well, I probably still would) but a majority of the claims made on various creams are completely spurious yet are allowed to continue because the claims are not medical and therefore not regulated by the FDA or the FTC. However, when companies start delving into medical claims, they open themselves up to litigation and that is precisely what happened with Nivea in regards to their My Silhouette skin toning cream.

src

To be fair to Nivea's marketing department, they were very obtuse about what they claimed that this product can actually do, but in the end they were making indirect statements that regular use of this lotion cream would tone your skin and they even made some graphics that were indicating that regular use of this product would actually help you to lose weight and gain muscle - but only in a lady-like sexy sort of way.

src

I think that any normal rationally-thinking human is going to realize that rubbing any sort of cream on your body isn't going to result in weight loss, well maybe battery acid or some other sort of toxic concoction would work, but not in a way that makes you look great in a dress.

Nivea got busted for this not because they actually stated this in their commercials because they actually did nothing of the sort but instead they did a devious thing with internet search results so that they could make the claim that "we never said that!" It wasn't very difficult to follow the paper trail for the detectives over at the FTC and it was found that Nivea purchased targeted ads to make their product appear when anyone was searching for “thin waist” or “stomach fat."

Combine this with the subtle messages in their commercials and also the picture on the bottle itself, and you can understand that Nivea was actually doing this on purpose. Perhaps they thought they were being really inventive but that marketing innovation on their part ended up costing the company $900,000.

However, Nivea doesn't just operate in the United States and are a completely global brand. Their adverts in other parts of the world continued to make these spurious claims even after the lawsuit was settled.

Just a few minutes a day to look good and feel good! Wow! That sounds like an amazing product and putting lotion on yourself is certainly easier than doing exercise, right?

I think that most people understand that there is no cream in the world that is going to help you get into smaller pants aside from the lubricating effect to help to grease yourself into tight jeans and have a seriously uncomfortable night but enough people still buy into this crap even though as I've said over and over again - there is not shortcut to fitness and it certainly isn't going to arrive in an overpriced small tube of lotion.