Content note: Graphic body-horror imagery. This object is shown as it was published. Why
The Real Cost — "Your Skin"
A teen actor's face is shown with skin visibly peeling away in a televised anti-smoking PSA, dramatizing a real, longer-term harm (premature skin aging from smoking) as immediate bodily horror to deter teenage cigarette use.
Issued on 4 February 2014 by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's Center for Tobacco Products, this televised advertisement was aimed at the domestic public with a health warning. It shows a teen actor's face with skin peeling away, presenting premature skin aging from smoking as sudden bodily damage. The archive tags it as a fear appeal because harm is staged as imminent and one remedy is offered, without base rates or timeframe. The archive scores method rather than purpose, so a well-documented health claim is treated by the same definition as any other.
Propaganda techniques used in this advertisement
- Date
- February 4, 2014
- Period
- Contemporary
- Made by
- U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Center for Tobacco Products
Full record
Region, Country, Medium, Issuer type, Regime, Leader, Audience, Purpose, Theme, Source, Rights
- Region
- North America
- Country
- United States
- Medium
- Advertisement
- Issuer type
- State
- Regime
- Obama Administration
- Leader
- Barack Obama
- Audience
- Domestic public
- Purpose
- Warn or inform
- Theme
- Health
- Source
- Identified Openly sourced: the speaker is who they say they are
- Source
- U.S. Food and Drug Administration (via Wikimedia Commons, capped from a YouTube upload), retrieved September 25, 2026
- Rights
- Public domain (U.S. government work)
U.S. Food and Drug Administration, The Real Cost campaign, "Your Skin" (2014). Actor: Anna Lore.
Text on the object
Original (English) · read from the image, not independently checked
[illegible]
This is a shallow-depth-of-field video still: the actor is in sharp focus, and the convenience-store background (shelving, pennant bunting and what appears to be a poster or price board) is thrown into heavy bokeh, with no letterforms resolvable even on close crop. There is no burned-in caption, lower-third or end-card text in this particular frame (the campaign's on-screen text/URL, when present, appears in other frames of the PSA, not this one).
