"Girl math". Superdrug, tut tut tut

[GirlMathBS]

Why does it feel like the world is regressing?

My teen DD has seen it and thinks it is shameful too. Belittling young women into silly little girls who prioritise a (shitty) concealer over food 😒

It says more about you and your daughter if you both think it is saying you should skip a meal to buy makeup.

Trust me, it says far more about you that you genuinely can’t see through this ridiculous excuse of ‘marketing’. It stinks of underlying misogyny

Very well said. Applies to you @HollyKnight

Um that's what marketing is. The agenda is to get money from a targeted group of people.

Thats the message. I can’t believe you don’t see it?
”Instead of spending on a daily guilty pleasure [breakfast], get a product that will last way longer! So, instead of buying breakfast you can get the new viral e.l.f. concealer! Find out more options below and get these guilt-free!”

Breakfast= daily guilty pleasure
Make-up= guilt free product that lasts longer

Unless you are a Nigel Farage. He’s the only person I know that denies the obvious. He said the day after the vote that the big bus saying
“We send £350m a week to the EU, let’s spend it on the NHS instead. Vote Leave”

Didn’t at all carry the message that we should leave the EU so we can fund the NHS an extra £350m/week?

It's not saying food or any breakfast isn't as worthwhile as make up though is it, it's saying a takeaway coffee & croissant. If it was an image of actual groceries or something then sure, but it's an extravagance just like make up is.

It is saying that breakfast is a guilty daily pleasure. The coffee and croissant are just an example of a breakfast, just like the e.l.f. concealer is an example of one of the options (see below!) that you can buy. It is actually saying that breakfast is less worthwhile than makeup because makeup “lasts way longer!”

And you have to spend money to get any breakfast, so it doesn’t have to be breakfast out. They only picked coffee and croissant because it’s roughly the cost of the product they want you to buy instead of eating breakfast.

Breakfast OUT. Not breakfast. You know, like how budgeters say if you cut out your daily coffee from Starbucks you could afford X instead. They're not saying give up drinking coffee.

Breakfast out/Starbucks coffee is a treat for many people. They're saying treat yourself to make-up instead of treating yourself to a croissant from Costa.

I mean buying takeaway coffee & pastry for breakfast every morning would be a guilty pleasure if done daily; expensive & a rubbish way nutritionally to start the day. They are equating it to these sort of non essential food purchases because a bown of porridge or toast & eggs isn't going to cost anywhere near that is it.

In this case, they are trying to get young women to spend money for breakfast on makeup instead.

I can see impressionable school girls taking lunch money and skipping lunch so they can buy makeup on the way home from school on the basis of this ad.

This.

That is how they have made the message seem innocuous, and why I call it insidious- it is subtle and harmful.

No, they're trying to get young women who treat themselves to breakfast out to treat themselves to makeup instead.

🤣

Yes, but why pick on breakfast? When there is the eons old trope where teen girls are told to skip breakfast or they will get fat?

Why didn’t they pick something else to tell young women to skip in favour of buying makeup? And keep it for adults only?

Like instead of having a glass of wine…? Instead of eating a box of chocolate?

With the amount of leaping going on there, you should cancel your gym membership and buy the whole e.l.f. cosmetics line.

Well.. if this thread has taught Superdrug anything it is that their new marketing strategy works very well for those lacking a bit in the brain cell department!

And totally ignoring the 3rd order effects of their sexist advertising on impressionable teenagers.

Because their target is not older wine drinkers. Their target group is the people who waste/spend money on overpriced croissants from the coffee shop.

Exactly, their target is not 18+ women, but teenage school girls.

Of course it's sexist. It's makeup. Makeup is mainly geared towards women. Just like how anything to do with babies is mainly geared towards women. They target women because they know it is women who will be interested.

That's what marketing is. That's what social media is. They're not trying to help the world. They're trying to make money.

I don't know where you live but around here 18yo don't treat themselves to a glass of wine and 14yo don't go to Costa on their way to school in the morning.

Which as I said is a kind of limp echo of the original. Trying to even things up in parenthesis. The phrase “boy math” simply doesn’t have the same connotations. Any more than “running like a boy” does.

I’m a young woman and I find it fucking irritating.