This article is about the marketing of glutathione as a skin
whitening agent even without sufficient clinical back-up . It is approved by
the FDA as a food supplement and not a drug or cosmetic therefore it is against
the law to claim that glutathione can whiten complexion and cure certain
diseases.
The use of glutathione as a whitening skin agent was boosted
by claims of various celebrity endorsers mostly centered on billboards , print
ads and TV commercials with ad spending growing to more than 100% pegged at
around 5 billion pesos.
Before the boom, glutathione was primarily recommended by
dermatologists to treat melasma. But in 2008, Belo medicals entered the
bandwagon and posted its highest sales for the year. Because Filipinos lean
towards whiteners, glutathione sales
increased by 1000% in 2 years reaching 106.9 million pesos as compared
to 1.6 million pesos in 2007.
However the Lucida DS brand was exposed by Korina
Sanchez to lack the milligrams of
glutathione it advertises to contain. It has only 6.8 mg instead of the 500 mg
advertised. Despite this controversy, Filipinos still take glutathione to
whiten their skin.
There are many ways by which this article showed how
glutathione misled people:
a. It promoted glutathione’s whitening promise even
without sufficient clinical back-up.
b. It focused on glutathione’s whitening effect and
downplayed potential negative effects of overdose.
c. It was approved by FDA as a food supplement
however ads claim that it can cure certain diseases.
d. It utilized celebrity endorsers in order to
promote a bandwagon effect.
e. It advertised a brand to have a high content of
glutathione when in fact only a minimal
amount was present.
This article is related to statistics on the followings
ways:
a. It incorporated a survey done by Nestle
Philippines in 2008 regarding advertisements from food, beverages and
pharmaceuticals.
b. It utilized sample size from the population in
order to get the average spending in food, beverage and pharmaceuticals.
c. C. It utilized inferential statistics to
determine the amount in pesos spent for the advertisements.
d. It utilized a line graph which is part of
descriptive statistics to show the sales data of the Belo Medical Group from
2004 to 2010.
e. It also utilized a bar graph, which is a part of
descriptive statistics to show glutathione sales of White Beauty Philippines
from 2004 to 2009.
