The curious case of Penelope Cruz's eyelashes

Apart from a certain regal manner, Penelope Cruz has very little in common with the Queen. Yet last week both women found themselves at the centre of media-manipulation rows. In the Queen's case, it was a fake walk-out, and for Penelope Cruz, it was the fake lashes that she wore while advertising L'Oréal's new Telescopic Mascara.

While claiming Telescopic mascara would make eyelashes up to 60 per cent longer, Cruz herself was wearing individual falsies threaded in her lashes.

"We were concerned that L'Oréal had, only at a very late stage in the investigation, appreciated the importance of telling us that Penelope Cruz was wearing individual false lashes," noted the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), somewhat acidly, on requiring L'Oréal to withdraw the commercials.

That a few false eyelashes should cause such a flutter was not solely a silly-season sensation. The Cruz case attracted publicity because of the climate of heightened sensitivity to the "misleading" of viewers and consumers throughout the media.

Whether it be television phone-ins, royal documentaries, survival experts who sneak off to hotels or mascara advertising, the idea that the viewer is being duped is now sending tremors throughout the television and advertising worlds.

For the smoke-and-mirrors practitioners of cosmetics advertising, this new surge of anxiety over truthful representation is a big headache. In America, consumer protest has already gone beyond restrained complaints to regulators. The website Jezebel. com has struck fear into magazine editors by offering $10,000 (£5,000) for the best cover photograph before it has been airbrushed and retouched. This month's winner showed a leaked cover photo of 39-year-old Faith Hill, a country singer, before she was radically slimmed and unwrinkled by digital techniques.

"Women's magazine covers display what are essentially female forgeries, smothered in make-up, lit and fanned and shot with equipment that could be eBayed to finance an Ivy League education – and computer-aided artistry involving heavy airbrushing, contouring and rearranging to make hips look leaner and eyes that extra-special, inhuman hue of aquamarine," says Jeze-bel.

In Britain, some companies, such as Dove, have capitalised on the new obsession by launching a "real women" campaign to highlight the gulf between authentic females and advertising's images of unattainable perfection. Others have opted for bludgeoning the consumer with a barrage of peptides and pro-calcium and amino-acid pseudo- science in an effort to re-establish authority.

L'Oréal may well protest it was not even doing anything original. Boots has also been rapped for using false lashes on a model for its Two In One Vari-Lash Day & Night mascara, and industry insiders claim that no self-respecting actress leaves the house now without falsies, mostly the same "Audrey Hepburn-type" five or six extra lashes that Cruz was wearing.

L'Oréal has had several previous run-ins with the ASA, including over its advertisement for wrinkle cream featuring Claudia Schiffer. Yet the ongoing battle for truth in beauty advertising claims is one that the ASA is forced to wage in increasingly forensic detail.

A recent Head & Shoulders advertisement claimed the shampoo could get rid of "100 per cent visible flakes". When challenged, Procter and Gamble clarified that this 100 per cent figure applied to what you would see standing two feet away. The ASA insisted that "visible" had to mean what you see in the mirror.

Just last week, the ASA published a ruling against Nivea's DNAge cream, which claimed it could increase cell renewal and protect DNA from cell damage. Nivea had done clinical trials but it did them on the arm, which is not a good model for facial skin because it gets less sun exposure and has clear differences in quality.

Cosmetics companies also go into contortions to justify their use of words such as "slimming" or "effective", and it pays to focus like medieval clerics on every word. For example, some products claim to eradicate "superficial lines", yet these lines are transient ones caused by dryness, not sun damage, and they usually disappear when any moisturiser is applied.

According to Claire Forbes, communications director of the ASA, even when cosmetics companies advertise scientific testing, the full picture is sometimes missing: "We need to look at how scientifically robust a claim is, and whether the trial has a double blind and is placebo controlled," she said.

"Just because a trial has 1,000 people in it doesn't mean it's done properly. Then there was one ad we looked at citing a trial, where in fact the placebo did better than the product."

What you see in the finished commercial can have a tenuous relationship with reality. According to the former advertising director on the account of one cosmetics giant: "I remember shooting a commercial for a hair-perming product with a supermodel.

"We did use the product – just – but we would never have let her use the stuff herself. Only a tiny amount was applied in the course of treatment by a top hairdresser, and of course there was a professional make-up artist on board."

But though the marketing ploys of cosmetic companies sound surreal and frequently comic, there is a very serious side to it. Billions of pounds are at stake in a giant industry where competition is intense but the market is sluggish. "

As Jean-Paul Agon, the head of L'Oréal, says: "Beauty is not about just responding to consumer needs; it is about transforming dreams into reality. It is about creating and inventing satisfactions, emotions, pleasures, well-being, self-esteem and ultimately reasons for happiness. Beauty is about creating products that people will want and desire, not just need."

The beauty advertiser needs to be far more sensitive than others to the whims of the zeitgeist. Hence the current spate of multinational buy-ups of "green" beauty providers.

But does the current clamour for transparency ignore what is a far more complex and sophisticated relationship between advertisers and consumers? Ms Forbes believes consumers accept that cosmetics are a product to which different standards apply. "I think people realise that beauty ads are aspirational," she says. "We don't tend to get more than one or two complaints about disputed ads, whereas some commercials can get hundreds of complaints."

Certainly the ASA has not registered signs of major disenchantment from consumers about the levels of accuracy. Health and beauty commercials account for only a small slice of the 25,000 complaints to the ASA each year – just 1,559 last year.

Advertisers know consumers apply a different level of expectation of commercials for make-up than they would for a car, say, or a barbecue set, but does that make them complicit in any falsehoods being perpetrated? Should we really expect beauty products to do what they say on the tin, or will we not bat an eyelash?

>Because he's worth it...

There is much at stake for Jean-Paul Agon, 51, the new chief executive of L'Oréal. At 100 years old, this is the world's largest cosmetics group, with brands including Garnier, Redken, Elsève and Fructis in hair care, Lancôme, Helena Rubenstein, Shu Uemura and Maybelline in make-up, and Biotherm and Vichy for skin care.

Agon has spent his entire career at the French cosmetics giant, working in Asia – where he had great success with Maybelline's Wonder Curl mascara, because Japanese women don't like their short, straight lashes – and the US.

On the upside, big companies are making major breakthroughs in formulations to delay the signs of ageing.

On the downside, the European market has slowed. Agon is hoping to attract new trade from older customers, men, and emerging markets.