by Pia Guerrero, Editor and Co-founder
It’s a given that marketers use violence and sex to sell everything from cars to music, but make-up? M.A.C.’s fall/winter collection, “Juarez”, named after the Mexican city notorious for decades of rampant rape and murder of women and girls, is doing just that.
It’s important to note that these femicides are mostly of area factory workers, whose deaths now range in the thousands and have gone ignored by police since they began in 1993.
So it’s no coincidence that M.A.C.’s collection consists of lip-stick, eye-shadow and even nail-polish with names like Ghost Town, Factory and Quinceañera. The models for the campaign are made up as mummies, zombies and ghosts who look like they’ve met untimely deaths, buried in their favorite white, gauzy party dresses.
M.A.C.’s designers, Rodarte, claim it’s not death that motivated the direction and name of the line. They state to NYmag.com, it is “the ethereal nature of this landscape [that] influenced the creative development and desert palette of the collection”.
Countless towns in Mexico boast such beauty. Why not use them as an artistic muse?
In response to consumer complaints M.A.C. has officially apologized and will be renaming the line. But as the saying goes, “Any press, is good press”, and just like sex and violence, controversy sells.
Peeling flesh tights and mummy blouse by Rodarte
The industry leader has also announced that they will donate up to $100k of profits of the new line to a non-profit working on improving the lives of women in Juarez.
After this controversy–and probably because of it–M.A.C. stands to make millions on the collection. Way more than the small amount allocated for it’s chosen cause.
Death, rape, violence used to make a profit on make-up?
Don’t buy it!
