Beyonce appears in a new ad for Loréal Feria Haircolor. Her hair is a pretty shade of auburn and her skin looks a lot lighter to match. Loréal says they didn’t do anything to lighten Beyonce’s skin though. It’s possible by some stretch of the imagination that it was the lighting. The cosmetics company could have said one of their retouching artists went too far and they regret the error, but that could be a slippery slope for them. Everyone knows their ads are all airbrushed but they have to maintain the illusion that their makeup and hair dye work that well and that we’ll achieve a kind of ageless perfection by buying it:

Yesterday, a new print ad for L’Oréal Paris’ Feria hair color surfaced, featuring a seemingly paler than usual Beyoncé Knowles. Today, the French cosmetics giant is adamantly denying that it gave its longtime spokeswoman a case of the Michael Jacksons.

“Beyoncé Knowles has been a spokesperson for the L’OréalParis brand since 2001,” the company said in a statement to E! News, after coming under withering online attacks suggesting the ad (on right, above) lightened more than just the hair color of the brand’s famous face.

“We highly value our relationship with Ms. Knowles. It is categorically untrue that L’Oréal Paris altered Ms. Knowles’ features or skin-tone in the campaign for Feria’s hair color.”

A rep for the 27-year-old Knowles declined to comment beyond the L’Oréal statement.

The ad is appearing in this month’s Elle, Allure and Essence. So far the magazines have not said anything about possible Pantone issues.

[From E! Online]

Beyoncé probably doesn’t give a flip that she looks so much different in the Feria ads. She made $4.7 million for just ten days work with that contract, according to documents obtained by The Smoking Gun.

This does bring up a lot of issues about whether the beauty industry is touting paler as prettier. L’Oréal has shown Beyoné with her accurate-looking skin tone in makeup ads, and maybe they outsourced these haircolor ads to another company or tried to enhance the auburn hair color with the result of changing her skin tone. It probably wasn’t a conscious decision to make Beyoncé paler. It could just have been a brightness/contrast/hue change made to the entire photo in an attempt to make the hair look prettier that resulted in lightening her skin.

At first I was pretty skeptical and believed that her skin must have been lightened, but then I found event photos where she looks almost this pale. It could be an artifact due to the bright lighting. L’Oréal is not talking so it’s not like we’re going to find out how it happened. The least they could do is acknowledge that she looks a lot different and apologize for the error. This company hasn’t stopped animal testing, though, so it’s not like we expect them to be anything but defensive about it.

um ok

http://www.celeb*tchy.com/13471/loral_swears_they_didnt_lighten_beyonces...