 Making claims people can trustÂ
Longevity has become beauty’s new favourite word. It’s on serums, body creams, supplements and treatment lists, and the science behind it is moving quickly enough that most marketing teams are writing claims faster than their labs can substantiate them. And consumers, who are getting very good at spotting the gap between a scientific-sounding claim and an actual result, have started taking notice.Â
For industries like financial services, their marketing teams have a thorough checking routine most beauty teams would find exhausting. Every claim has to be evidenced before it even goes near a campaign, every statistic carries a named source, and compliance holds a genuine veto over creative. It looks painfully slow from the outside, and as our sister agency, Balance, can attest it can be troublesome, but it’s given finance brands years of practice at something the beauty industry is about to need badly…how can we regulate terms like longevity? Â
Longevity and beauty marketing Â
The term first escaped form skincare marketing and we’ve seen it with some of our own skincare clients, and the obsession over the word is real. Skincare marketing has since moved on and we’re seeing more in haircare products, make-up, even some fragrance ad copy. L’Oréal chief executive Nicolas Hieronimus described the shift in March 2026 as a “new era of science”. Â
With the shift, naturally the audience has widened too. Terms like prejuvenation and collagen banking have pulled 20-somethings into a category that once spoke almost exclusively to women over 45, which means a single product now needs to make sense to two very different buyers.Â
That growth has produced its own problem, and the industry already has a name for it. Longevity-washing describes products that borrow the vocabulary without carrying the evidence, and the temptation is easy to understand. Preventative benefits resist the before-and-after formats that beauty social thrives on, so brands reach for bolder wording to fill the gap.Â
What the ASA will actually let you sayÂ
The Advertising Standards Authority spent April and May 2026 working through a run of cosmetic anti-ageing rulings, and the pattern across them should worry any brand writing longevity copy. Holding data is no longer enough. The regulator wants evidence that reflects the finished product as it is sold, not the isolated active inside it, and it rejected a peer-reviewed paper from a major dermo-cosmetic brand on exactly that basis. Â
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The ruling shows how tight the standard has become. The ASA found the brand Eucerin had not evidenced that exosomes, once formulated into a topical serum and applied to the face, produced the regenerative effect described, and it noted that unqualified claims such as “rejuvenation” are not generally acceptable for cosmetic products. Â
Two further rules catch longevity marketing repeatedly. Every distinct claim needs its own evidence, so proof of improved texture does not license a claim about lifting. And any numerical or time-based claim, whether that’s a percentage or looking five years younger, needs instrumental data rather than purely consumer self-assessment and reviews. Something all brands should consider: audit your claims before someone else does it for you. Â
Your customers are already scepticalÂ
The Fashion Institute of Technology’s Cosmetics and Fragrance Marketing programme surveyed 1,654 beauty consumers in May 2026 for its Longevity of Beauty study, and the trust hierarchy it found is stark. Dermatologists and doctors are trusted by 75% of respondents and scientists by 67%, against a mere 5% for influencers. Â
More uncomfortable for longevity brands specifically: only 14% said terms like NAD+, exosomes and epigenetics made a product feel more credible, while 32% read them as marketing language. It’s interesting to see that vocabulary that feels like proof internally, reads as just noise to a third of your audience. Â
Timing expectations are the other trap-Â 42% of consumers expect visible results within a month, which is faster than healthy-ageing biology delivers, so a brand that stays vague about timelines loses believers by week four.Â
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AI systems are checking your homework tooÂ
Research into generative engine optimisation (AI SEO), including a Princeton study presented at KDD in 2024, found that adding statistics to content lifted citation frequency in AI search results by 41%, and in contrast, if you don’t provide any statistics to back up your claims, you’re likely to get penalised: unsubstantiated claims without numbers or sources are among the things that actively reduce citation odds, while author bylines, organisation schema and consistent identity across can help web raise them. Â
The LLM models weigh-up consistency across independent sources when deciding how confident they are to recommend a brand, which means a claim your own site makes, unsupported by press, reviews or expert coverage, simply does not get repeated back to the consumer. Our own independent research backs this up further,  showing that the AI’s source brand owned content just 7% of the time.Â
The same FIT research found just 2% of consumers currently consult AI platforms for product reviews before buying. The behaviour that earns AI citations is identical to the behaviour that keeps the ASA satisfied, so this costs you nothing extra. Our SEO services team treats the two as one workstream.Â
 What you can do nextÂ
Here’s a couple of actionable takeaways we suggest you, as beauty markets do…Â
Log into GA4 and pull your five highest-traffic product pages and read every efficacy claim on them, including the ones buried in the ingredient copy. Then put each through four questions:Â
- Does the evidence cover the finished formulation, or only the active ingredient in isolation?Â
- Would a consumer read this claim the way you intend it, or would they hear something stronger?Â
- Is every statistic sourced, dated, and based on instrumental measurement rather than how testers said they felt?Â
- Does the product name itself make a claim you would struggle to defend?Â
The ASA applies the same substantiation standard to product names as it does to ad copy – a serum with “renewal” in the title is making a claim before anyone reads a word of the description. Anything that fails a question gets rewritten or evidenced properly. Nothing stays live on the strength of it having always been there.Â
Secondly, make credentialed experts a visible part of your brand, not just a footnote in your marketing. Start with quotes to back your claims, then build up to real faces and video content across your website and socials, the more visible the expert, the more credible the claim.Â
