BITE Insight

The latest advert from Boot’s skincare brand No7 sees Amanda Foster, a 50-year-old Hollywood stuntwoman who has doubled for the likes of Whoopi Goldberg, Halle Berry and Beyoncé, bursting through a glass window and jumping out of a high-rise building onto an inflated airbag below. The ad is part of the ongoing ‘Ready’ campaign showcasing No7’s latest range of Age Defying serums. As Foster is helped off the air bag towards the end of the ad, she declares, “I’ve never been the right age to jump out of a building” before walking past the much younger actress she has just performed the stunt for.

The ad was directed by Susanne Bier who is the first female director to win an Oscar, Emmy and Golden Globe and who recently directed the award-winning TV series The Night Manager. The ads look further than the simple act of getting ready and instead focus on what women, the heroines of the campaigns, are getting ready for. Their skincare and beauty regimes are simply a part of their lives, not the whole picture.

Previous adverts include Ready to Speak Up, featuring the author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie speaking about how feminism and femininity do not need to exist as mutually exclusive entities; how her decision to front a skincare and beauty campaign does not negate her feminist views. The first ad of the Ready series was Ready to Move, which showed 53-year-old Alessandra Ferri, who was the Royal Ballet’s youngest ever principal dancer, dancing alongside a hologram of her 19-year-old self. The ad demonstrated how Ferri’s dancing capabilities have only grown and improved with age, rather than being hampered by it.

The campaign showcases women who are going against convention, defying the expectations and limitations that society has placed on them because of their age.