理性谈风月

有朋友爆料，一篇题为踢爆The Body Shop惊天骗局的文章引用加拿大报纸趁其创始人Anita Roddick过世而回首往事的报道，揭露了护肤品品牌The Body Shop的三大骗局。

下面先引用一下这三大骗局：

1、不是原创是盗版
最初Roddick的The Body Shop产品，无论是它绿色的包装还是宣传语都是从真正的The Body Shop(位于美国加州伯克利市)原封不动地搬过来的。事后原创人想起诉Anita Roddick却在1987年被用3百万美金封住了嘴，还被迫改名为The Body Shop。

2、从没有对慈善机构捐钱
Anita Roddick以她“高尚的”职业道德著称，据传她每年都捐大笔大笔的钱给慈善机构。但是英国的Charity Commision却说在最初的11年The Body Shop对慈善作出的贡献是零，一分钱都没有捐。

3、“纯天然”成分里含有大量防腐剂
the body shop说他们的产品百分之百纯天然，但国家邮报又说：the body shop产品中含有大量的防腐剂、从石油提取的色素、 还有人造香料，以至于产品闻起来和看起来都那么“天然”。

第一、第二点都是首次听说，长见识了。至于第三点，其实看过我Blog的读者该不会有吃惊的感觉。在《自然·环保·奢侈》一文中中介绍The Body Shop，我就指出过类似问题，只不过没有扣上骗局的帽子。

在很多人印象中，Bodyshop也是属于自然系的护肤品品牌。消费者会有这个印象并不奇怪，它家的产品线往往以植物成分名划分，比如茶树系列、芦荟系 列、海藻系列、杏仁系列。其实，Bodyshop虽然护肤品中含有大量天然植物成分，但是仍旧以化工成分为主要成分，这一点从Bodyshop产品的成分 表上清晰可见。当然，这丝毫不奇怪。除了像精油这样的产品，大多数护肤品都必须加上一大堆界面活性剂、防腐剂之类，而这些大多数都是化工成分。虽然 Bodyshop不是那么自然，但是绝对可称是环保先锋。Bodyshop一直以五个标签强调他们的五大理念，其中不少与环保有关

上网搜索了一下加拿大的原文报道， 甚有意思，其中的小细节很多，远不止上面那篇文章披露的那些，有兴趣的朋友不妨仔细看看。为方便诸位阅读，文末全文摘引了。

不过Tom上引用的那篇中文稿件有个很不厚道的地方，文末还附了一个“化妆品中的的有害成分” 的列表，让人看起来这似乎也是加拿大报道中指出The Body Shop存在的问题。但我看的原文报道并无这一部分，看来是中文作者不知道哪里找来加上的。这样处理明显存在误导。

我相信，绝大多数读者应该关心的还是The Body Shop作为护肤品的成分安全问题，今天太晚，改天这个话题专门聊。事先预告一下，The Body Shop也是凡品，问题肯定有，但也大不到哪里去。

The myth of the Green Queen

During her lifetime, Body Shop founder Anita Roddick savvily cultivated a reputation for innovation, integrity and social responsibility. As Jon Entine explains, the truth couldn't be more different
Jon Entine, National Post
Published: Friday, September 21, 2007

It's a September mid-morning and the concrete shacks lining the road into Ixmiquilpan, a dusty, poor town, are broiling, sending everyone into the town square. Young Nanhu Indian boys play a game with a stick and string, while the girls and their mothers, their hair tied with colourful berets, look on.

Suddenly, a mariachi band starts playing and six vans pull up. Out bounds Anita Roddick, the founder of The Body Shop. It's 1992 and these are the best of times for Anita --- everyone calls her by her first name. She is an international legend, part Robin Hood, part Mother Teresa. She rustles the hair of the boys and hugs the women, who giggle shyly at the white princess. There is a magnetic force about her. Charisma.

This ramshackle town was soon transformed into a Hollywood set. "It was a bizarre scene," recalled Alison Rockett, a young Canadian hired by Roddick to scout locations for the filming. "Port-o-johns with flush toilets were hauled in from Mexico City," four hours by bus to the south. "A chef was hired to prepare smorgasbord and fettuccine Alfredo."

There are two crews: American Express has sent 20 people to film Roddick as part of its "Don't leave home without it" campaign, and Body Shop has dispatched a PR team to tape Amex filming Anita. Although Roddick has long boasted she would never stoop so low as to advertise --- crass capitalism, she had said-- she has jumped at the promotional opportunity.

Anita walks into the crowd enveloped by an army of cameramen carrying boom mics and reflectors. "I want you to film my favourite people," she tells one cameraman, and then turns to the villagers. "I will be getting money for this filming, and I want to give it to you. What do you need?"

For the Nanhu, more is at stake than an advertisement. The local women make cheap exfoliating mitts from a local cactus plant for which they earned a profit of a peso (then equivalent to 17 cents) per mitt. If they could land a de-cent-sized order, there might be enough money to build a school or repair some houses. With the cameras rolling, one woman says the village needs a tortilla machine. A teacher asks for a library. Anita promises they'll get them.

"Anita just kept saying 'uh huh, uh huh', jotting down their requests on this little notepad," said Rockett. Word of her largesse spread quickly. People travelled for hours on foot to meet the woman who was going to lift them out of poverty. "She was so enthusiastic they thought she was going to buy them everything they needed. It was all done so spontaneously but really so thoughtlessly."

---

Even in the eyes of her sharpest critics, Roddick was larger than life, with a big heart, a quick wit and a foul mouth. She had chutzpah. The beauty business? It was made up of monsters that lied, cheated and exploited women by selling rubbish. Corporate executives? "F---ing robber barons." Investment bankers, the ones who floated her stock and made her a multi-millionaire? "Blood-sucking dinosaurs."

On the other hand, Roddick had no doubt about Body Shop's place in the pantheon of responsible companies. "I think you can trade ethically, be committed to social responsibility, empower your employees. I think you can rewrite the book on business," she often said. Many women idolized her for promoting a feminist business ethic based on "love" and "care" and "intuition."

Traditional cosmetic firms peddled beauty in a bottle. But under Roddick's vivid command, Body Shop took a commodity product and charged a huge "integrity premium," packaging idealism and hope for a better world. Customers snapped up her not-tested-on-animals Brazil-nut hair conditioner, making her rich and influential in the process. At its height, her Body Shop empire had more than 2,100 branches in 55 countries.

But Roddick's legion of admirers saw her as far more than just a beauty titan. In obituary after obituary, following her untimely death last week at the age of 64, she was celebrated for her outspoken support for social causes. Over the years, this ex-hippie had morphed into a renowned anti-capitalist gadfly, promoting the latest politically correct cause: ending animal testing; saving the whale; rescuing the rainforest; encouraging recycling; combating global warming.

When she began her campaigning ways, social marketing was a radical stance in the corporate world. Now, every company, it seems, is going green. Arguably, many of these "socially responsible" initiatives have their origins in promotions embraced, indeed invented, by Dame Anita. Which raises an important question: What is Anita Roddick's real legacy? Did The Body Shop "walk its talk" as Anita and her husband Gordon used to boast?

By the late 1980s, so-called "Trade Not Aid" had become the "cornerstone" of what Body Shop was all about, according to Anita. But it's difficult to determine what that meant. After all, Body Shop sold a commodity product --- cosmetics, readily available in comparable quality in any drugstore. Its brand image --- and profit margin --- revolved around its claims of honesty and integrity. Is it important that you "walk your talk," as Anita always claimed was Body Shop's credo?

Words versus deeds. It was always an issue at Roddick's Body Shop. "The new corporate responsibility is as simple as just saying no to torturers and despots," Anita proclaimed in 1992 at a keynote speech at an International Chamber of Commerce meeting in Cancun. "The world applauded when the Olympics chose not to go to Beijing-- we should listen to that message." Yet, even as Roddick was delivering her speech, Body Shop was sourcing millions of dollars of goods from China.

Body Shop's first trading scheme, manufacturing footsie rollers in India at an orphanage for young boys, blew up amid charges that the orphanage was run by a pedophile, about whom the Roddicks had been warned of in advance. Its first Brazilian project, Amazon bath beads made from babassu oil, were actually made from refined oil purchased from Croda Chemical. (Babassu nuts aren't even grown in the rainforest.)

The biggest controversy swirled around its sourcing of Brazil nuts from the Kayapo, whose chief would later successfully sue Body Shop for exploiting his image for commercial gain. Former University of Chicago anthropologist Terrence Turner, an expert on the Kayapo, ridiculed the initiative as a gimmick, calling it "Aid Not Trade" --- aid by developing peoples to Body Shop with no real trade in return. "Don't be fooled by Body Shops benevolent exterior. Their project has been very disruptive for the Kayapo." At the height of the publicity surrounding Body Shop's ethical trading claims, in 1993, Roddick was sourcing no more than 0.165 % of its goods from fair-trade sources.

"Anita is a myth-o-maniac," said Mara Amats, who set up another of Roddick's failed celebrated projects, a papermaking venture in Nepal. Amats said Roddick rejected the chance to work with UNICEF to make high quality paper using rice paper harvested in an environmentally sensitive manner, but instead bought cheap paper that didn't sell. "They just made symbolic purchases" as a promotional gimmick, she said. "Anita instinctively understood the facile nature of the press and just played to it. She had her head in the clouds and her feet in s--t."

That's too harsh a judgment. Roddick's Achilles heal was her unbounded enthusiasm that allowed her to promise the world without evidencing much regret when she did not or could not deliver.

Consider what happened in Mexico, after the commercial was in the can. The local Nanhu were thrilled--at first. But soon, the caterers packed away their omelette pans and white tablecloths, and Roddick and the crews departed. In the months that followed, there were no first world wages. The promised gifts and increased orders for scrub mitts never materialized.

"Anita broke every rule in Anthropology 101," Rockett said. "In the days after she left, people were abuzz with talk of presents that this white goddess was going to send them. Months after she left, people were still saying, 'Where's my tortilleria?' "

"Roddick had no understanding of what it's like working with pre-capitalist cultures," sighed Peter Winkel, the Dutch anthropologist who headed the Mexican project. When, after three years of ravaging inflation, he suggested a small raise in the price she paid for the mitts, Roddick wouldn't budge. "They told me they could get similar mitts cheaper in India, so I dropped it."

---

The conflicting stories about the origins of The Body Shop offer perhaps the most revealing insight into Roddick's character. The idea for the shops just popped into her head, Roddick wrote in Body and Soul, the first of her numerous ghostwritten autobiographies. She claimed she came up with the clever name from the auto-repair businesses, named "body shops," that she noticed while travelling with Gordon in California in 1970. Six years later, Roddick opened her first store in Brighton, England, offering exotic-sounding "natural" potions sold in small plastic bottles with hand-written labels.

There was a slight gap in her recounting of the story, however. Her shops did trace to body shops that Anita had seen in her travels, but not of the auto variety. While in San Francisco and Berkeley, Anita and Gordon had visited a tiny hippie shop owned by Peggy Short and Jane Saunders, sisters by marriage. It was a fun place, offering "biodegradable" shampoos and lotions made with avocado, cocoa butter and cucumber, packaged in round refillable plastic bottles with handwritten labels. The store carried glycerin soaps scented with strawberry and perfume oil redolent of gardenia. It was housed in CJ's, formerly an auto garage. The founders cleverly named it "The Body Shop."

"That was the place to buy shampoo and body cream," said Alma Dunstan, the paramour of David Edwards, Gordon's longtime friend, who lived in the Bay Area and hosted Anita and Gordon during the visit. She recalled Anita going on a buying binge at The Body Shop in San Francisco, walking out with fistfuls of hand-cut soaps, loofahs --and brochures.

The Roddicks' copycat shop, opened six years later, nicked everything from the business name to the green colour scheme to the cosmetic line. The original Body Shop brochure noted: "All of our products are biodegradable & made to our specifications ? Bottles 20?? or bring your own." Anita's version read: "All our products are biologically soft and made to our specifications ? Bottles 12p, or bring your own." The original offered Four O'clock Astringent Lotion; Anita sold Five O'clock Astringent Lotion.

The heist continued for many years thereafter. A particularly telling knockoff is a still popular facial scrub made from ground adzuki beans, which Anita called "Japanese Washing Grains." She bragged that she came up with the idea for it during a sojourn through Asia. The truth is more prosaic. The Korean woman who made the kimonos sold in the Bay Area shops shared her family's secret preparation, which led to "Korean Washing Grains," introduced years before.

Why didn't the founders of the California Body Shop challenge Roddick? Offered US$3.5-million in 1987 to change their name to Body Time, Peggy and Jane opted for the promise of lifetime security. As part of the settlement, they agreed to a gag order. But over the years, Roddick's claims to have originated the concept began to grate.

"What really got them angry was the ongoing deception," said David Brostoff, a former executive with Body Time. "Anita's constant lie that she originated the idea, the green colour scheme, the products, all the things that gave the company its unique identity ? never in our wildest imagination did [we] think that Roddick, with all her claims about being so honest, would keep this fabrication going," Brostoff said.

The origin story was only one of the many myths of The Body Shop, I discovered in 1993, when I first began investigating the company.

The investigation culminated in the publication of an award-winning article, Shattered Image: Is The Body Shop Too Good to Be True? in the U.S.-based Business Ethics magazine in 1994, which sent the stock on a multi-year tailspin.

As the green marketing movement that Roddick helped birth gathered momentum, and Roddick rolled out her franchise into suburban malls around the world, misrepresentations mounted. Roddick claimed in company "fact sheets" that Body Shop "donated an inordinately high percentage of pre-tax profits to often controversial charitable campaigns." The English Charity Commission contended differently. Over the first 11 years of its business, The Body Shop made zero charitable contributions --- not one penny. After my expose, in 1994, the company's percentage of contributions, based on its pre-tax profits, increased dramatically. But because it struggled financially, its charitable donations were always modest in comparison to companies with similar revenues.

What about its "natural products"? Roddick and her brochures touted them as "100% natural." Not. From the very first, Roddick added massive doses of chemical preservatives, petrochemical-based dyes and artificial fragrances so the cosmetics smelled like their natural-sounding names, all to create the "fun" atmosphere that became so much a part of The Body Shop's image.

"Roddick never could care less about ingredients," said Mark Constantine, Anita' original cosmetologist, who left the company in the 1980s and later went on to co-found Lush. It never even entered into her consciousness." Today, The Body Shop retains its reputation in the cosmetic industry as a producer of drug-store quality faux natural beauty products, but with high street prices.

An environmental leader? Let's be real for a moment and separate Roddick's verbiage from her practices. She sold cosmetics made mostly with water, colourings, fragrances and preservatives made from petrochemicals. Body Shop packages beauty notions in plastic bottles, an anathema to serious environmentalists, and ships them around the world in carbon-belching trucks and planes. From an environmental perspective, its business model is a train wreck.

From its earliest days, Body Shop was always more about image than substance. In 1979, the Roddicks contracted with Janis Raven, who ran a public relations company in London, to ramp up promotions. Janis, Mark and Anita became the merry mythmakers, concocting elaborate fables about some of their best-selling natural-sounding cosmetics: cocoa butter inspired by Hawaiian natives; peppermint foot lotion mixed on request of the London Marathon; eye gel developed for a computer firm concerned about worker eye strain. The stories, like Anita's claims of travelling the world before the stores opened and discovering cosmetic wonders, were all fabrications.

"The pineapple facial wash ? we talked about Anita going to Sri Lanka and seeing the women rubbing pineapples over them. You know, that kind of nonsense."

Why was it nonsense?

"Because it wasn't true. That was Mark's information, and we just decided to make it a bit more romantic."

Even the widely held belief that Roddick was the original source of Body Shop's social consciousness was an exaggeration.

"Mark is the one who actually got her fired up about green things," Raven recalled. Anita knew little about cosmetics and was originally oblivious to the debate over animal testing.

"She and I used to have arguments over whether 'not tested on animals' should be on the bloody bottle," Constantine said. "She couldn't see the point. It was just a few vegetarians and ex-hippies."

Body Shop's celebrated campaigns didn't begin until 1986, when the company faced its first serious challenge to its natural marketing niche from Revlon and Marks & Spencer. Looking for a way to promote her products made with jojoba oil, which Body Shop claimed was a substitute for whale spermaceti --- it isn't --- Anita hooked up with Greenpeace U.K., printing fundraising posters to "save the whale." Raven, who shortly thereafter left in a salary dispute, created a brilliant media campaign that established Anita as the Queen of Green.

"The link with Greenpeace signals a change in corporate attitude at The Body Shop," Raven read from her scrapbook as we talked in her office. This marks a "serious public commitment to protecting the natural world." She looked up and at me and laughed. "That is a real serious sort of nonsense statement, isn't it? And I wrote it."

But it worked. Emboldened by the PR coup, Anita threw herself behind one cause after another. Body Shop's "two-for-one" promotion had idealistic girls agog: Buy a bottle of lotion and get social justice for free.

The anointing of Saint Anita had begun. "She went a bit over the top," said Raven. "Anita just disappeared up her own backside. She started to believe her own publicity."

In one sense, the fibs are understandable. After all, few retail ideas are original, and Roddick has earned her reputation as a savvy businesswoman. In fact, for a brief period into the early '90s, Body Shop was a case study in success.

It thrived on the idealism of young women like Toni Lambert, a management trainee at Royal Bank in the early 1980s, when she wandered into a Body Shop and was charmed by its sense of fun. "I was 24 years old and for the first time, I knew that this is what I wanted to do," she told me. Lambert came to own two Toronto-area franchises, and eventually moved to Michigan, opening more Body Shops.

It was during this period that Body Shop reached a tipping point. In its early days, its vast network of franchisees, who had paid a pittance for the right to open a shop, profited. But sales slipped. According to court filings involving nine U.S. franchises, to cut costs Body Shop consistently understocked franchisees by as much as 40% and discriminated against them in favour of company-owned stores. Even as the company raked in sizable profits selling new franchises and pushing wholesale products through the system, franchisees faced brutal competition from copycats, like The Limited's Bath and Body Works, which sold similar drugstore-quality products, but at lower prices.

Franchisee revolts erupted in Norway, Scotland, Britain, France, Spain, the United States and Canada. "For 12 years, I put everything I owned into that company --- my life, my home," Lambert says, who found sales and once-massive profit margins collapsing. "I even adopted a new country." In 2001, an Ontario Superior Court Judge scolded Body Shop for attempting "an egregious breach of widely accepted commercial morality ? not consonant with our system of justice and general moral outlook," prompting Body Shop to reach an out-of-court settlement.

As part of a massive shift away from its franchising model in the late 1990s, the company shuttered or took over hundreds of shops and paid out more than $200-million to settle with dissidents. In August, 2000, Roddick tacitly acknowledged the depths of the problems, deriding her creation as a "dysfunctional coffin." It was an odd comment as she and her husband were desperately searching for a suitor to take the damaged goods off their hands. With only bottom feeders expressing interest, they installed yet another executive team, the fourth corporate makeover in a decade.

The Roddicks finally agreed to back away from the business, and The Body Shop commenced a remarkable resurgence that returned it solidly into the black. Last year, the Roddicks agreed to sell to L'Oreal for US$1.3-billion, a fraction of its estimated worth 15 years previously.

---

In recent years, with the responsibility of actually running a business behind her, Roddick moved on to her real passion: stumping for her brand of social justice. She and Gordon made almost US$250-million from the sale, on top of the hundreds of millions they had earned over the years. Saying that she believed it was a disgrace to die rich, she donated US$60-million to her foundation.

Anita Roddick had what amounted to a cult following among followers who believed she had ushered in a new age of responsible business. But when the solemnity subsides and the history books are finally written, she is not likely to be remembered as the world's most socially responsible executive. She recognized long before most businesses that the world economy was headed toward a commodity model, with products differentiated mostly by brand image. She rode the green wave she helped create into the suburban malls of the world, becoming unimaginably wealthy in the process. Let's not forget what Dame Anita wrote, in large type and bolded, in the last line of Body and Soul: "I'm doing this for me."

Perhaps if Anita Roddick had not spent most of her career promoting herself as a model ethical businesswoman she would not have become such a target.

"She stands full square between Estee Lauder and Elizabeth Arden," said Mark Constantine. "They all wrote their own stories." In the end, she is just one more beauty baroness who created a myth to make her dreams come true. Anita never could decide whether she wanted to practise her social vision or merely exploit it. - Jon Entine is a columnist and board member for Ethical Corporation magazine, adjunct fellow for the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., and a sustainability consultant for Northlich, a brand management firm based in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Tag:Body Shop , 成分 , 护肤品

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