A local skin-care products company may have lost a bit of its luster.
Kansas City-based DERMAdoctor Inc. and its owner on Monday settled a complaint brought by the Federal Trade Commission over allegedly deceptive claims made by the company.
The FTC charged that DERMAdoctor Inc. and its principal, dermatologist Audrey Kunin, made misleading claims about DERMAdoctor’s anti-aging and body-slimming products.
According to the FTC, DERMAdoctor claimed its Photodynamic Therapy lotions, which sell for $85 an ounce, could capture UV light and transform it into visible red light that has purported anti-aging effects on the skin.
It also claimed its Shrinking Beauty product, which costs $58 for a 5.5-ounce tube, improved the appearance of cellulite, smoothed and tightened skin, and was “clinically proven to reduce measurements up to one inch in two weeks.”
The settlement with the FTC, first reported by The Pitch magazine, requires DERMAdoctor and Kunin to:
- Back up anti-aging and cellulite-reduction claims with “competent and reliable scientific evidence;”
- Back up weight-loss and reduction-of-body-size claims with at least two double-blind randomized controlled trials; and
- Pay a judgment of $12,675
The monetary amount represents a fraction of the $843,996 judgment specified in the settlement, which was filed in federal court in Kansas City. Elizabeth Nach, an attorney with the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, said the agency “typically takes into account the defendant’s ability to pay when reaching a settlement involving a monetary judgment, so that’s where the $12,765 came from.”
The Federal Trade Commission Act gives the FTC the power to prevent unfair or deceptive practices affecting interstate commerce.
“As with any other product covered by the FTC Act,” Nach said, “substantiation requirements apply for advertising to cosmetics too, particularly for the types of objectively verifiable claims that we challenged in the complaint.”
Neither Kunin nor her attorneys could be reached for comment.
Kunin founded DERMAdoctor in 1998. The company markets its products online as well as from an office at 19th and McGee streets that it opened in September 2009.
Kunin has appeared on “The Dr. Oz Show” and the QVC channel. She has written a book, “DermaDoctor SkinStruction Manual: The Smart Guide to Healthy, Beautiful Skin and Looking Good at Any Age,” that was published in 2005.
Brian Barron, content and research director for Beautypedia, a website that evaluates skin-care and makeup products, said that he respected Kunin and that she’d “written a lot of good articles with factual information about skin care, things that a dermatologist should know and should be telling her patients.” He called her book a “good, straightforward reference guide.”
But referring to DERMAdoctor’s Photodynamic Therapy lotions, he said, “It’s not physiologically possible for the skin to really do anything with UV light because what it would be converted to is about as strong as the LED emitting from your digital alarm clock.”
He added, “I can’t say for sure that they knew what they were stating was impossible or misleading, to say the least. You have to figure that, though, from a dermatologist.”
In a review of DERMAdoctor’s product line, Beautypedia rated Photodynamic Therapy lotion “poor.”
The website described DERMAdoctor as “another dermatologist-developed line with plenty of products whose names and claims make you think they're a cosmetic corrective procedure in a bottle (or, in some cases, a jar, which is never a good packaging move).”
It said the company has “some products to pay attention to” though it noted “DERMAdoctor products aren’t cheap.”
Dan Margolies, editor of the Heartland Health Monitor team, is based at KCUR.
