Anonymous: "Buy This Dior Makeup Because Dior Treated Us All to a Free Collection of Their Products"

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The discussion is heating up over our post yesterday wherein we asked an attorney for the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) why bloggers have to disclose freebies and samples and print writers/editors don't. Comment of the day, so far, comes from an anonymous reader:

The gap is closing between magazines and blogs. As a teen and college student, I used to worship Vogue. It was the be-all end-all of style and fashion. However, as I've grown older, wiser and perhaps less trusting, I'm more hesitant to buy a magazine like Vogue. I'd much rather surf fashion blogs and the comments on such sites to find out what types of clothes/shoes/bags/makeup/hair stuff people are buying, and what real girls are doing with those products.

It's much more exciting to see a girl that could be your friend looking fabulous on her own accord than a lifeless waif who has been dressed and combed and painted by a whole team of people. Likewise, I'm much more apt to buy something that the fabulous potential friend girl recommends than something splashed inside Vogue because a team of middle-aged businesspeople deem it luxurious.

So, if Fabulous Friend Girl should have to say, "Hey, Prada sent me these shoes for free so I can advertise them here, but I think they're awesome and go perfectly with x, y, and z," then the editors at print mags should have to say, "We want you to buy this Dior makeup because Dior treated us all to a free collection of their products." I think the short version of this paragraph is essentially, at least for me: Fashion magazines are already losing some of their power, and sometimes their credibility, to bloggers, so they should be doing all they can to try to win that back.

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· Why does the FTC mandate that bloggers disclose freebies when print editors don't [Racked]