Every Beauty Commercial From The Super Bowl, Analyzed

From Cetaphil to CeraVe.

Did the beauty industry win the Super Bowl? If it did, the rest of us lost! Ahead, a mini-analysis of each ~$7 million skincare/lip gloss/foundation commercial that aired on Sunday night.

Cetaphil

In this (maybe stolen?) Cetaphil spot, a sports-loving father and pop-loving daughter find common ground in fandom (football for him, Taylor Swift for her). They bond over the big game… and skincare.

This is a classic case of the industry inserting beauty products into unrelated stories of love and connection as a way to assert the products’ importance and/or obscure their purpose.

What’s obscured: Cetaphil is owned by Galderma, a pharmaceutical corporation that also owns Dysport (a Botox alternative), Restylane, and Sculptra. This company does not care about your daughters. It financially depends on your daughters hating their faces — or, at the very least, being so consumed by the desire to change their faces (even in the name of “fun!”) that they’ll spend a not-insignificant amount of their finite time, money, energy, and brain space freezing, filling, or otherwise fussing with them for the rest of their lives.

CeraVe

CeraVe’s Super Bowl commercial was the culmination of a multi-week collaboration between the brand and actor Michael Cera. Its absurdist humor gestures at the absurdity of celebrity-led skincare, and attempts to reestablish dermatologists as trusted experts. But does it work?

Celebrity skincare lines are typically formulated in partnership with dermatologists, anyway. Dermatologists can now become social media celebrities in their own right, and often use that fame to launch their own “celebrity” brands. (Real celeb derms even starred in the CeraVe commercial.) And what makes the dermatologists on the L’Oreal/CeraVe payroll more trustworthy than, say, this one? Dermatology is part of the beauty culture problem, too! It absorbs beauty standards into its healthcare protocols, and contributes to the industry-wide conflation of medical care and aesthetic manipulation.

Of course, science is wonderful, skin cancer screenings are essential, etc. But all too often in beauty, “follow the science” leads back to the pseudoscience of physically and psychologically damaging beauty standards and/or environmental destruction (i.e., the ceramides in CeraVe are fine for your skin, but another key ingredient in the product, petrolatum, is a byproduct of the single worst thing to ever happen to human skin: the fossil fuel industry).

E.l.f. Beauty

E.l.f. Beauty’s Super Bowl commercial is titled “In E.l.f. We Trust” (notice it positions itself as “God”) and stars Judge Judy, who declares that “beauty fades” but “dumb is forever” as she orders Gina Torres of Suits to swap her $92 foundation for E.l.f.’s $14 version.

I keep coming back to two things here: 1) “Beauty fades but dumb is forever” is a more effective argument against investing one’s time/money/energy/brain space in beauty culture, and 2) the curious case of Judge Judy as beauty ambassador. I don’t know… I’m wondering if Judge Judy and Michael Cera — both commercial faces of the beauty industry now, but neither previously invested in beauty as an interest or personalty trait or even a performance — are evidence of a sort of “cosmetic realism”: the idea that cosmetic consumerism is so embedded in the fabric of Western society that it’s impossible to imagine anyone opting out, and therefore anyone can function as its icon??

NYX

On Sunday night, NYX Professional Makeup revealed that the full ad for its Duck Plump Lip Plumping Gloss (above) was not approved for broadcast during the Super Bowl. In the brand’s own words:

“The first half of the Big Game spot introduces Cardi B, a long-time fan of the brand (and not one to back down from fun innuendo), in all her glory and lands the message that this new product will deliver “bigger” and “plumper” results. The second of – which will not be shown during the Big Game – shifts to an immediate reaction to what we’ve all just seen. The men of America have looked past the fact that it’s a lip gloss. They’ve failed to spot the “U” in the word “duck”, and they’ve well and truly misused this revolutionary new product.”

The spot ends with multiple men suffering in the emergency room because they applied Duck Plump to their dicks.

How do I hate this? Let me count the ways: There’s the (re)introduction of the duck as yet another dehumanizing beauty icon (lol); the implication that women are expected/encouraged to incur the pain of this gloss — care of “spicy” ginger, an ingredient which may cause inflammation and therefore temporary plumpness — in the name of beauty, even though it’s apparently powerful enough to send grown men to the hospital; the way the product copy boasts “the ultimate injectionless pout” while Cardi B’s lips are seemingly injection-full.

Mostly, though, I cannot get behind the manufactured outrage over broadcasters rejecting this commercial. If my outrage will be directed at a Super Bowl commercial, it will be the one the Israeli government paid to air as it carried out “unlawful attacks” on Palestinians in Rafah, “causing mass civilian casualties amid real risk of genocide,” per Amnesty International — not an ad for lip gloss.