What we did not publish
A product page is usually judged by what is on it. This page is about what is not, because the omissions are a decision and a decision should be visible.
Seventy-six images arrived with this product. Seventy are on this site. Six are not, and none of them was dropped for weight or layout.
Each of the six makes a claim — that a journal covered the product, that these are customers, that this is the body it produces — and nothing supplied with them supports the claim.
The list
Produced from the build itself. It is the actual set of files the site refused, not a description of one.
Six of the images supplied with this product are not on this site. They are not missing by accident and they were not dropped for weight. Each one makes a claim — that a journal covered the product, that these are customers, that this is the body it produces — and nothing supplied with them supports the claim. The list below is generated from the build itself, so it is the actual set of files the site refused.
Snapshots of five people holding the bottle, styled as polaroids. These are testimonial photographs, and the pack supplies no testimonial they belong to - it says its reviews are layout copy.
Two bare-torso fitness models. Same problem, and it is a physique this product was never shown to produce.
A close crop of a waist being pinched with a tape measure. A before-and-after picture in one frame. Nothing was supplied that would make a body-change image true of this product.
A studio portrait cut out against transparency, with no name, caption or context. On a product page a floating portrait reads as a customer or an expert, and nothing supplied says which.
The wide version of the same snapshots.
A row of publication and society mastheads. Nothing in the pack says any of them wrote about this product, and a row of mastheads on a product page reads as an endorsement. We have no evidence of one.
The three rules behind those decisions
A masthead is an endorsement
A row of publication logos on a product page says those publications wrote about the product. If they did, the article is the thing to link. If they did not, the row is a borrowed reputation.
1 image
A face is a person
A photograph of someone holding the bottle says they bought it and would say so. None of the supplied snapshots is attached to any of the eight supplied reviews, and the pack calls those reviews layout copy.
3 images
A body is a result
A waist being measured, or a bare torso, on a weight-management page is a before-and-after without the labels. Nothing supplied would make either true of this product.
2 images
It is a shorter list than the last product in this series produced, and that is worth saying plainly: this pack contained less of this kind of material, and the label it came with was better. Both facts belong in the same report.
What each one would need to be publishable
| What was supplied | What it would take to publish it |
|---|---|
| A row of publication mastheads | A link to the article, with its date and author. One link would settle it. |
| Five people holding the bottle | A verified purchase, a date, the reviewer’s own words, and their permission to publish the photograph alongside them. |
| A studio portrait with no caption | A name, a role, and a statement in that person’s own words about their connection to the product. |
| A waist being measured | A study. Not a testimonial and not a permission form — a measurement, in people, at the dose this product actually delivers. |
| Bare-torso fitness models | The same, and it is the row least likely ever to be filled in. |
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Nothing in the right-hand column is onerous, and most of it is what any publisher would ask for before printing the same material. The reason to write it out is that a reader who never sees the request never learns it was not met.
What we did publish, and what it proves
| What | Published? | What it establishes |
|---|---|---|
| The label flat | Yes, at full size | Every declared amount on this site. It is the primary document and the reason this site can do arithmetic. |
| The bottle and the pack shots | Yes | What the product looks like and how many bottles are in a pack. Nothing about price, which was never supplied. |
| Ingredient stills and the science graphics | Yes | What chicory root, potato starch and a bacterium look like. They are illustrations, not evidence, and the pages say so. |
| The quality marks | Yes, with an audit | That the mark is printed. Each is shown beside what was supplied to back it — which for ten of eleven is nothing. |
| The six bonus covers | Yes, once, with a caveat | That six covers exist. Nothing was supplied about contents, delivery, or which packs include them. |
| Lifestyle photographs | Some | Nothing. They are decoration, and the ones that implied a body change were dropped. |
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What it costs to publish them anyway
The obvious cost is to you: you cannot tell a site that checked from a site that did not, so you have to treat both the same way, which means treating the careful one as if it were careless. That is a bad trade for everybody except the careless site.
It moves the burden onto you
A masthead you cannot verify and a customer you cannot contact both leave you doing the checking the page was supposed to do.
It makes the real thing worthless
If every page carries a logo bar, a logo bar stops meaning anything, and the sites with a genuine write-up lose the benefit of it.
It buries the actual question
Every minute spent wondering whether the portrait is a customer is a minute not spent asking how many organisms are in the capsule, which is the question that would help you.
So the rule this site follows is narrow and easy to check: if a claim cannot be traced to the label or to a source named on the sources page, it does not appear. The six images above are what that rule looks like when it costs something.
The count, for the record
| Category | Supplied | Published |
|---|---|---|
| Images in the pack | 76 | 70 |
| Refused on the grounds above | 6 | 0 |
| Duplicate renders skipped for weight | 35 | 0 — second copies of marks, covers and composites already on the site |
| Reviews supplied | 1,169 claimed, 8 written out | 0 |
| Star ratings supplied | 1 | 0 |
| Order counts supplied | 1 | 0 |
| Prices supplied | 0 | 0 |
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The last row is not a decision this site made. No price was supplied for any pack, which is why none is printed and why the structured data on this site carries no offers block.
The rule, written out
Four lines. They decide every image on this site and every sentence beside one.
- If a picture makes a claim, the claim needs a source. A masthead needs the article. A white coat needs a name and a credential. A customer needs a purchase and a permission.
- If the source was not supplied, the picture is not published. Not cropped, not captioned around, not used smaller. Not published.
- The decision is recorded where a reader can find it. On this page, generated from the build rather than written by hand, so it cannot drift from what actually happened.
- An illustration is allowed, and is labelled as one. A photograph of chicory root illustrates chicory root. It does not illustrate a result, and the caption says so.
The fourth line is the one that keeps the site from being unreadable. Refusing every photograph would be easy and would produce a page nobody wants to look at. The distinction that matters is between a picture of a thing and a picture of an outcome, and only the second needs evidence behind it.
Every image on this site falls on one side of that line. The six above fell on the other.
See the SlimTide packs
One, three or six bottles. The price is on the seller’s checkout page, because it is one of the few figures this site was never given — and a figure we were not given is not a figure we will print.
Shipping cost and delivery time were not supplied either, which matters more than usual on a product whose label asks for refrigeration. The guarantee is 60 days from purchase unless the sales page prints longer.
References
The sources behind the numbers on this page.
- U.S. Food and Drug AdministrationAvoiding Products Contaminated with Hidden Ingredients · sourceFDA cannot test products before they reach the market, its database covers only a small fraction of what is out there, and buyers are told to be wary of products carrying multiple rave reviews.
- Federal Trade CommissionGut Check: A Reference Guide for Media on Spotting False Weight Loss Claims · sourceThe claims FTC says are always false, beginning with weight loss of two pounds or more a week for a month or more without dieting or exercise.