LONDON — Cult Beauty, which built its name on selling high-performance brands and products with a loyal following, is taking a stand against airbrushing and in favor of young people’s mental health.

The wonder e-commerce site, which launched in 2007 and is owned by THG, has unveiled a campaign to eliminate retouched photos from its products and materials.

Additionally it is urging the broader U.K. beauty industry to support a parliamentary bill that might make it mandatory to declare when a picture has been digitally altered to reinforce a model’s face or body.

Cult’s campaign, “Can’t (Re)Touch This,” is geared toward reducing the variety of airbrushed model images “amid an epidemic of eating disorders and mental health problems amongst young people.”

The brand has written to British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak (a father of two school-age girls) demanding tough latest laws regulating the usage of enhanced body images.

“Digital platforms have fueled an epidemic of hysteria and eating disorders amongst men and women alike by promoting exaggerated body shape and altered skin tones,” Cult Beauty said.

It added that the number of youngsters being treated for eating disorders on pediatric wards within the U.K. has “greater than doubled” over the past three years.

A recent report by the Mental Health Foundation, a U.K. charity, found that 35 percent of adults and 31 percent of teenagers surveyed felt “ashamed or depressed” due to their body image.

Cult Beauty is making a slew of changes, reminiscent of putting restrictions on retouching imagery photographed by its creatives. The corporate can also be devising a latest labeling system for the brand’s digital media and social channels, marking its images as “un(re)touched.”

Additionally it is planning to create a further labeling system for third-party, brand partner and influencer images hosted on its site and on social channels in order that it’s clear all images supplied by Cult Beauty haven’t been retouched.

The corporate has beefed up its guidelines to be certain that diversity and inclusion sit on the forefront of its branding, and said it can display visuals that represent people of all shapes, sizes and colours. 

Cult Beauty is reviewing the language and copywriting guidelines “to reframe the issues that the industry has historically vilified.” 

In an open letter to the British government cosigned by Mental Health U.K., Cult Beauty’s managing director Francesca Elliott is urging government ministers to back the proposed latest laws.

“As a society, we’ve celebrated thinness, youth and flawlessness — elevating certain attributes while vilifying the whole lot beyond the strict parameters of ‘perfect,’” the letter reads.

“Spots, wrinkles, cellulite, body hair — these are only examples of normal things which were airbrushed out of ads and model images for a long time — intending to be ‘beautiful’ we now have needed to reject the fact of our bodies, and adapt to a mold that wasn’t made for us,” Elliott writes.

The corporate is supporting a parliamentary bill proposed by member of Parliament Dr. Luke Evans, which might make it mandatory for all corporations to declare when a picture has been digitally tweaked to reinforce body proportions. The Digitally Altered Body Images Bill is currently before Parliament.