“Irresponsible and harmful” cosmetic surgery ad banned

Harrogate cosmetic surgery brand MYA has had an advert dubbed “irresponsible and harmful” banned from TV, amid a downturn in the industry.

The advert, seen on 16 January 2017, sees women discussing breast sizes in changing rooms and on treadmills.

A complainant said that the ad “exploited” young women’s insecurities about their bodies and challenged whether the advert was “irresponsible and harmful” to those under 18 years of age.

MYA argued that the ad featured on-screen text which emphasised that surgical procedures were not without risk and that the decision to have surgery must not be made lightly.

It said that it was clearly directed at people that had been thinking about having surgery for a while, and that it had intended to prevent viewers from rushing into cosmetic surgery.

The company stressed that the characters in the ad were real patients, and they had used patients that were over the age of 21 and looked over 25 “to ensure the ad did not appeal to females under the age of 18”.

It said the ad had been given a restriction by ad clearance service Clearcast ensuring that it was not shown during or adjacent to children’s programmes or programmes directed at or likely to appeal to audiences below the age of 18.

The Advertising Standards Authority acknowledged that the ad was not irresponsible on the grounds of trivialising cosmetic surgery, but this was not sufficient to ensure that the ad was not irresponsible, and also harmful to under-18s, by exploiting women’s insecurities about their bodies.

It said the women in the advert discussed the negative perceptions they held of their breasts prior to cosmetic surgery, with comments that their breasts were previously “saggy”, “out of proportion” and “of different sizes”.

The ASA said that because of this, the ad disproportionately emphasised the women’s negative feelings about their bodies and suggested that women who did not have a particular body type should not feel confident and comfortable with their bodies in public.

It concluded that the ad was irresponsible and likely to cause harm to those under 18. The ASA ordered that it could not appear again in its current form.

This follows statistics from the British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons that showed a 40% downturn in the numbers of people looking to cosmetic surgery in 2016, from a record high of 51,000 in 2015.

Commentators have suggested this has been down to the rise of more “natural” celebrities on social media.

MYA has had adverts pulled before by the ASA, in 2014 and 2015, for adverts that it said trivialised cosmetic surgery. Both complaints were upheld.

TheBusinessDesk.com has contacted MYA for comment.