A reader recently sent me an interesting bit of PR. An organization called Safecosmetics.org is trying to raise awareness of lead in lipstick. Lead in lipstick seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to get worked up, if you are the kind of person who gets worked up about such things. As you might expect, Imagethief is not that kind of person (Mrs. Imagethief may feel differently). Nor, I gather, is the reader who sent this to me. What he found interesting was not the issue, but the presentation.

Safecosmetics.orgs recently published a study of the problem of fully leaded lipstick. Their press release announcing the study has this lede:

Boston – Toys made in China aren’t the only products laced with dangerous heavy metals: lipstick manufactured in the United States and used daily by millions of American women also contains surprisingly high levels of lead, according to new product tests released today by the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics. The lead tests were conducted by an independent laboratory over the month of September on red lipsticks bought in Boston, Hartford, Conn., San Francisco and Minneapolis.

They open with China but immediately go on to say that the problem lipstick is, in fact, manufactured in the US. That's fair enough. China is mentioned only twice in the report. Once in the overview, using the same paragraph as the one from the press release above, and once on page 5 in a reference to Mattel not being complacent about even small amounts of lead in some of their toys. Nowhere in the report does it suggest that lead in lipstick is a Chinese problem or China-related quality issue.

But here is a screen cap of the part of the landing page (linked to above) that links to the press release on the study:

Lethal lipstick

This photo is also the cover image of the report PDF. So there is an invocation of China in the lede and the main page and report cover feature a distinctly Chinese looking little girl. One or the other wouldn't arouse notice. But together? Charitably, the photograph is just a photograph. After all, the US is full of Asian Americans. I hear from reliable sources that about fifty percent of them use lipstick. But combined with the press release lede it looks like an attempt to use the China product quality scandal to propel awareness of a completely unrelated issue.

My reader, an Asian, thought this was an act of unconscious racism. I think it's a completely conscious if slightly cynical bit of PR engineering. What do you think?

Note: Thanks to DL for the link.