Viviane Ashcombe

What regulatory approval and consumer-health claims really mean.

Viviane Ashcombe is a consumer-health and regulatory-affairs journalist who has spent her career explaining what a government agency’s stamp of approval does and does not guarantee. She began by reporting on beauty-industry marketing claims before widening her lens to pharmaceutical regulation and comparative law. She is, by her own admission, incapable of walking past a “clinically proven” label without wanting to see the study.