L’Oréal Paris UK has cast a woman who wears an Islamic headscarf as a model in a hair care product campaign.
Youtuber and Instagram personality Amena Khan called the L’Oréal hair care ad campaign, launched Monday, “game changing” for showcasing a woman who completely covers her hair.
“How many brands are doing things like this? Not many. They’re literally putting a girl in a headscarf – whose hair you can’t see – in a hair campaign,” she told the British edition of Vogue.
The fashion magazine applauded the “conversations” the ad will “provoke”, saying that L’Oréal has now “democratised” its “Worth It” messaging.
“Whether or not your hair is on display it doesn’t affect how much you care about it,” Ms. Khan says in her portion of the one minute-ad which featured other “diverse British ambassadors and influencers”.
L’Oréal Paris UK General Manager Adrien Koskas called the commercial a “disruptive campaign for the haircare market”.
Last year, L’Oréal Paris UK fired its first transgender ‘ambassador’ Munroe Bergdorf, then hailed as the new “face of modern diversity”, after Bergdorf made racist comments online about the “violent” white “race”, later claiming that “all white people benefit from racism”.
According to a survey of major advertisers undertaken in August 2017, companies are putting ‘diversity’ above marketplace relevance, with more than one-third of advertisers saying the approach was adopted to “prevent perceived discrimination”.
In November, a politically correct Christmas advert by leading supermarket chain Tesco was criticised for featuring Muslims, including little girls in hijabs, and what appears to be a gay couple along with other diverse figures – but which did not feature one recognisably Christian character or iconography.
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