Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Facial water

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was delete. MBisanz ^talk 00:38, 1 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Facial water

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Once the spam is stripped out, there's nothing left. This product is self-evidently a waste of money but I don't think we have any evidence that it's a notable waste of money. Guy (Help!) 10:14, 24 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Delete I've been itching to start an Afd for a while now. The problem is that the term means whatever a given manufacturer wants us to think it means. Other than the fact that multiple manufacturers have glommed onto the same term, making it a generic, it's no different from any other meaningless fake quality that individual manufacturers attribute to their products, as exemplified by Firesign Theatre's one-liner about Ersatz Brothers Coffee, with "Zest Appeal". So, for any given explanation the article might give as to what it is, we'd have a verifiability problem, in connection with an independent reliable source problem.

We could say that the phrase itself is notable as a marketing term, and write an article from that perspective. But I was just trying to identify sources that look at it from that perspective and came up empty-handed. —Largo Plazo (talk) 13:16, 24 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Delete, not notable and Wikipedia is not a dictionary. Kierzek (talk) 13:24, 24 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Fashion-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 16:15, 24 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Health and fitness-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 16:15, 24 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Comment Without taking a position at this time about whether the article should be deleted, I'd like to point out that the article formerly contained five references; the nominator stripped out four of them before nominating the remaining stub for deletion. The article as it used to be can be seen here. --MelanieN (talk) 17:13, 24 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Following up on those, the phrase "facial water" appears in only one of the references. The rest discuss "facial spray", "facial mist", or "facial lotion", but not one of them speaks of the water content of these products as being something one would call "facial water". One of them discusses "thermal water", saying nothing more about it than that it's water from thermal springs. It notes that thermal water is full of minerals. Minerals? In other words, hard water—which is one of the things that the earlier version of the article said is bad for the skin. "Facial water" should contain minerals, but it shouldn't contain minerals. Clearly, the whole concept is fuzzy and subjective and even contradictory. There's no substance to it. —Largo Plazo (talk) 18:00, 24 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Comment: I have to admit that I'm a little leery of this, given that this article had been previously created by Sibtain 007 sockpuppets. I'm also unsure as to whether or not the disclosure on the talk page means to say that this was created by someone acting as a paid editor, possibly for the same people who hired Sibtain 007 to create the article in the first place. I almost hate to mention this, but if this is the case then that poses a pretty big issue here if Largo is correct and this was created with faulty sources that do not back up the content. Tokyogirl79 (｡◕‿◕｡) 04:03, 25 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Here's the article before sources and content were stripped from it. I have to admit that my feelings of leeriness are increasing since the article does twist words around. Here's my rundown of the sources and what they claimed in the article.

Oprah. This is an advice column and that's not really the strongest source out there, if it can be used as a source at all. It was being used to back up a quotes by Leslie Baumann. However what bothers me is that these are quotes taken from someone else quoting the doctor and the quotes were used to laud the ability to use facial water. The tone of the advice column is actually relatively negative since the advisor is fairly dismissive of the claims. This is included in the article but is given only one sentence whereas the quotes by Baumann take up a good portion of the article. In other words, the negative stuff was deliberately downplayed in order to play up the good things to be said about the product.
Fashionista. This is a semi-brief article reviewing several facial moisturizing products, some of which would somewhat fall under this criteria. It wasn't written by a staff member, but there does seem to be an editorial board. This one is somewhat usable, but it's far from the strongest source. The thing to take into consideration here is that many of these wouldn't necessarily fall under the idea of "facial water" since some of them seem to label themselves more as moisturizers than specifically facial water.
Living Green Mag. This one is one that I wouldn't consider a RS, to be honest. It's ultimately a how to guide on creating your own sprays. There does seem to be some editorial control, but it's hard to say how much is really done since their editorial guidelines give off the impression that if they have to edit it, they won't post it.
Style Bistro. This is kind of what Largo meant by being vague. The article talks about thermal water and while it does say you can spritz it on your face, it's kind of vague in that it looks like you can spray it anywhere you wish. Now what's most concerning about this is that while the article does quote a study, the study does not appear to be about facial misting but about mineral water in general - however it's used in the WP article in such a manner that it gives off the impression that the study endorses the use of facial or thermal water.
PopSugar. This is an article about travel tips in general and while the face mist is given a paragraph, it's not particularly in depth. It's ultimately an opinion article where one person gives their own personal list of tips for traveling. The WP article quotes the person.
China Radio International. I initially wasn't going to say that this was a RS, but apparently it's legit. Still, it's not the strongest source to go on. This one is critical of facial water and while its used in the WP article in a subsection, this was given an extremely small section. This wouldn't be so awful except that when you consider that you have a large two paragraph section extolling the virtues of facial water...

Basically, I can see why these were removed and if this is to be kept in any form, they'd have to be 86'd because this is pretty much a good example as to why people argue so stringently against paid editors. A large bulk of the article was devoted to promoting the product and saying nice things about it, even to the point where a few of the things quoted could be construed as being taken out of context, such as the case study. Unless someone can pull up the study and show where it would specifically endorse facial water, using it in the article is sort of false advertising or at the very least, something done for pure promotion. What also bothers me here is that if we were to boil this down to the barest essentials (moreso than what's currently on the article), ultimately what we'd have is a 2-4 sentence article that says "Some companies are selling facial misting products as beauty products that can treat skin. While there have been some who have praised the product, others have criticized it as a potential scam." That's pretty much all that needs to be said about this based on the current sources. I'd suggest merging it into another article, but this doesn't really have a good redirect target. The best would probably be something like toner or moisturizer (since natural skin care is so general that content about specific topics wouldn't really fit in well), but part of the issue is that this product's claims are so incredibly vague that it doesn't fit in well anywhere. Unless I can find some extremely great sources out there, I'm leaning towards a delete and salt, with the strict requirement that if this is recreated, it is only by someone who is absolutely and completely 200% not a paid editor. I hate to sound mean, but the impression I'm getting here is that while Sibtain 007 may have had their socks blocked, they just found another way around the issue by getting an existing Wikipedia editor to re-add the content. While the newest version of the article was more neutral, it was still promotional (meaning that I'm almost 80% sure that the article was tailored to what the client wanted for the most part since while it's less promotional, the same claims are ultimately still there in the article for the most part) and there were some definite issues with how the sources were used. Tokyogirl79 (｡◕‿◕｡) 05:00, 25 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.