Charlotte Dawson slammed for faking her own fake tan adverts and using filters that glitter
REALITY TV star Charlotte Dawson has been “named and shamed” by the advertising watchdog for a FOUTH time after promoting her tanning products on Instagram, which fans claimed were fake.
The 30-year-old has been repeatedly in trouble with the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) in the last two years for her social media posts, which break online government guidelines.
ASA received a number of complaints over three Instagram posts, which she didn’t flag as ads for her tanning range Dawsylicious with fans also complaining that the posts were so heavily filtered that it exaggerated the quality of the products.
In one ad, Charlotte, daughter of late funnyman Les Dawson, featured an image of an arm with sparkle emojis for an “illuminating skin moisturiser” called Golden Shine, which led to objections that she was falsely claiming her products could sparkle.
Her new PR team said they’d only been appointed after the ads were put online in June and July 2022 and have spoken to her about using the right ad hashtag in future.
Regarding claims Charlotte was faking her fake tan, an ASA statement said that her management reckoned “that the filters, [which] were applied to give a misleading impression about the performance capabilities of the product, was subjective to each individual person.”
It goes onto say: “They believed it was clear, with a filter named “Golden Shine” which generated sparkles on the screen, that it was a filter used because Ms Dawson enjoyed how it looked on the screen, rather than that she was trying to suggest to her followers that her Dawsylicious tanning product would produce the sparkles in reality.
“They understood it was named “Golden Shine” because the colour of the sparkles was golden. However, they had requested that Charlotte be more careful with her choice of filters when promoting her tanning range.”
In December 2021, the Ex On The Beach star was rapped for promoting the same products and, again, not labelling them as ads.
This was after the previous July she’d received the same warning from ASA over a series of posts on her IG promoting her own make-up brand.
The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) said: “We told Charlotte Dawson to ensure that she made clear the commercial intent of her posts in future and that her ads were obviously identifiable as marketing communications, for example, by including a clear and prominent identifier such as ‘#ad’ at the start of the post.”
In April 2022, ASA was forced to put her on a blacklist tweeting the news that “we’ve added Charlotte Dawson to our non-compliant influencer page for repeatedly failing to disclose ads on her social media.”