How many times of you seen an television add for a product like Febreeze or Clean & Clear that shows a CGI clip of how the product “scientifically” works. I feel that these advertisements are unethical because they take advantage of the uneducated general public. These cartoon depictions often use small dots of green or brown “germs” or “dirt” that get washed away by the cleaning solution usually depicted as blue particles or water getting splashed into a skin pore.

Clean and Clear Television Commercial

The traditional Clean & Clear advertisements sill show a side view of a human poor. The depiction will show the water and cleaning solution splash into the poor and clean it out. Anyone with any scientific background knows this entire depiction is completely false. Water can’t even get into your poors because its surface tension is to strong to get “splashed in to a tiny poor”. These cleaning products work by drying out your skin by cutting your natural oils with emulsifiers. Millions of young people watch these ads and think wow “science says this product works” when in reality the depiction has nothing do do with what is actually happening.

Febreeze Air Freshener Television Commercial

The Febreeze example bothers me a lot more because while the depiction of Clean & Clear is in accurate the product does in fact clean your skin. With Fabreeze the entire product is unethical because they are marketing as a cleaning agent when in fact it is simply just a perfume. Worse than that the adds almost always use fear to make their target market, mothers, by making telling them that there are dangerous germs in their carpet and sofas. They suggest that you would be an incompetent mother or host if you don’t use Febreeze to clean away these germs. There is simply no way that the Febreeze solution can actually significantly clean your carpet or sofas as it is only applied by spraying it on to the surface. Only the outermost layer would even make contact with the antibacterial solution. Febreeze is unethically marketed because it uses dramatizations of “science” to convince and scare its uneducated target segment into buying the product to solve a problem that doesn’t exist.