The language of beauty copywriting, and where its words came from
Beauty copy is one of the most distinctive registers in commercial English. It has a grammar, a lexicon and a history, and most of it was assembled to say something impressive without saying anything actionable.
Cosmetic advertising language developed a characteristic register in the twentieth century built on borrowed authority from medicine and science, on abstract nouns that cannot be measured, and on constructions that imply a claim without making one. Several widely used terms, including hypoallergenic and non comedogenic, have no legally defined standard in most jurisdictions. Regulators address the problem through general rules requiring objective claims to be substantiated rather than by defining individual words.
Read a cosmetics carton with a linguist's attention and something odd emerges. Very little of the text makes a claim in the strict sense. There are abstract nouns, comparatives without a comparison class, verbs in the infinitive with no subject, technical vocabulary in ornamental positions, and a persistent grammatical mood that suggests without asserting. Helps to. Designed to. Visibly. Up to. For the look of.
This is not an accident and it is not laziness. It is a highly evolved register, shaped over a century by the interaction between what sells and what a regulator can act on.
Where the words come from
Start with the etymologies, several of which are genuinely delightful and, unusually for this field, well documented.
- Cosmetic comes through Greek kosmetikos, from kosmos, meaning order or arrangement. The original sense is to put in order, and it is the same root as cosmos. Cosmetics and the universe share a word.
- Glamour is a Scots variant of grammar. In the older sense, grammar meant learning, and learning meant occult learning, so a glamour was an enchantment cast to make something appear other than it is. The word entered wider English use in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and its modern sense is a considerable softening of what it originally meant.
- Mascara comes from Spanish and Italian words for mask.
- Shampoo comes from a South Asian word meaning to press or knead, and arrived in English through the practice of therapeutic massage. It was popularised in Britain by Sake Dean Mahomed, who opened bathing establishments in Brighton in the early nineteenth century and advertised himself as a shampooing practitioner. It meant massage before it meant washing hair.
- Serum is Latin for whey, the watery part left when milk curdles. It acquired its medical sense for the fluid part of blood, and cosmetics borrowed it from medicine to mean a thin concentrated preparation.
- Toner comes from photography and printing, where toning altered the colour of an image. Applied to skin, it means almost nothing specific.
Borrowed authority
The single most productive move in the history of beauty copy is the borrowing of medical and scientific register. It began early. Nineteenth century proprietary preparations advertised in the language of the pharmacopoeia. Helena Rubinstein's business, as noted in the essay on the industry's founding, was built partly on a claim to scientific classification of skin.
The borrowing operates at several levels: vocabulary, in words like formula, complex, active, molecule, dermal; visual, in the laboratory imagery discussed above; and structural, in the use of percentages, trial language and results presented in the format of research.
The regulatory response has been to treat these as claims and require substantiation. In the United Kingdom, advertising is governed by codes administered by the advertising regulator, under which objective claims must be capable of substantiation before publication, and the regulator has upheld complaints in this sector many times, including against claims supported only by consumer perception surveys presented as though they measured a physical effect.
The words with no definition
Several of the most reassuring terms in cosmetic marketing have no legal definition in most jurisdictions, which is not a scandal so much as a structural feature worth knowing.
Hypoallergenic means, in ordinary use, less likely to cause an allergic reaction. It has no standardised threshold, no required testing protocol and no defined comparator in most markets. The American regulator has stated plainly that there are no federal standards governing the term. It is not meaningless, because a manufacturer must still be able to substantiate the impression the word creates, but it does not certify anything.
Non comedogenic claims that a product does not block pores. There is no mandated test. Historical testing methods, including an assay performed on rabbit ears, are of limited relevance to human skin, and there is no standard by which two products carrying the term can be compared.
Dermatologically tested states that a test was conducted involving a dermatologist. It says nothing about the result, the sample size or the protocol. It is true and uninformative, which is a difficult combination to regulate.
Clean is the newest and the most interesting, because it is defined entirely by absence and the list of absences varies by seller. It descends directly from the moral vocabulary of purity examined in the essay on soap, and it performs the same function: it makes a claim about virtue while appearing to make one about chemistry.
The most effective phrases in this trade are the ones that cannot be false, because they have not said anything.
- The claim
- Terms like hypoallergenic and dermatologically tested are legally defined and certified by regulators before a product can use them.
- Where it appears to come from
- A reasonable assumption on a consumer's part, reinforced by the clinical appearance of the terms and by the fact that some other label elements, such as the ingredient list, genuinely are prescribed by law.
- What is actually established
- Established: ingredient listing is legally required in the United Kingdom and European Union, using a standard international nomenclature in descending order of quantity. Established: advertising codes require objective claims to be substantiable, and regulators have acted against unsupported cosmetic claims. Not established: any legal definition of hypoallergenic or non comedogenic in most markets, or any certification process behind them. There is no body that grants a product the right to say hypoallergenic. The control is retrospective and complaint driven, not prior and certifying.
The grammar of not quite saying it
Four constructions do most of the work, and once seen they cannot be unseen.
The hedged verb. Helps to reduce. Works to improve. Aids in. The hedge shifts the claim from an outcome to a contribution towards an outcome, which is far harder to falsify.
The appearance qualifier. Reduces the appearance of fine lines. This is a claim about an image rather than a physiology, and it is generally true of anything that reflects light evenly.
The unbounded comparative. Up to eighty per cent. Up to sets a ceiling, not a floor. Zero satisfies it.
The consumer perception result. Eight in ten women agreed. This measures opinion after use, which is a real thing to measure and not the same as the effect being implied. Regulators in Britain and the European Union have been explicit that perception data cannot substantiate a performance claim, and the wording of such claims has become correspondingly careful.
A defence, and a limit
It would be easy to end this in the register of exposure, and this magazine has no interest in that. Advertising has always been persuasion, buyers have always known it, and there is a long and respectable argument that the pleasure of a beautifully made promise is part of what is being purchased. A jar that says renewal is not lying to anyone who has read a jar before.
The limit is where the register borrows the authority of a discipline that operates by different rules. Science has a mechanism for being wrong in public. Advertising does not. When copy adopts the appearance of the first while operating under the incentives of the second, the reader is being asked to extend trust that was earned somewhere else. That is the specific thing regulation exists to address, and it is why the frameworks described in the essay on colour regulation are as much a cultural achievement as a technical one.
Where to look
Readers who want to go further should start with the holdings themselves rather than with summaries of them. The Advertising Standards Authority and the US Food and Drug Administration both publish catalogue and research material relevant to this article. Both links are given for reference only. Neither institution has been assessed by us, neither has any connection to this magazine, and nothing here is an endorsement of any organisation.
Questions readers send us
Does hypoallergenic mean anything legally?
In most markets, no. There is no standardised definition, threshold or required test. The advertising rules still require that a claim be substantiable, so the word is not free of consequence, but no body certifies a product as hypoallergenic.
What does dermatologically tested actually tell me?
That a test involving a dermatologist took place. It says nothing about the result, the protocol, the number of participants or what was being tested for. It is a statement about process, not outcome.
Where does the word shampoo come from?
From a South Asian word meaning to press or knead. It entered English meaning therapeutic massage and was popularised in Britain by Sake Dean Mahomed, who opened bathing establishments in Brighton in the early nineteenth century. The sense of washing hair came later.
Is glamour really related to grammar?
Yes. Glamour is a Scots variant of grammar, which in older usage meant learning and by extension occult learning. A glamour was an enchantment making something appear other than it is, and the modern sense is a considerable softening.
Can advertisers say anything they like about cosmetics?
No. In the United Kingdom, objective claims must be capable of substantiation before publication under the advertising codes, and the regulator has upheld many complaints in this sector. The system is complaint driven and retrospective rather than a licensing regime, which is why unsupported claims can appear before being withdrawn.
- Advertising Standards Authority The advertising codes and published rulings on cosmetic and beauty claims.
- US Food and Drug Administration Statements on the regulatory status of terms including hypoallergenic.
- legislation.gov.uk Cosmetic product regulation, labelling and consumer protection legislation.
- British Library Historical advertising collections and trade press.
- Wellcome Collection Proprietary medicine advertising and the history of medical claims.
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