When waiting for the bus, I often meet a familiar face: Keira Knightley, eyes a-smoulder, perfume bottle clasped in hand and her lips pursed in that famous provocative pucker.

Then you have the models: arms strategically placed, squeezing every last bit of cleavage out there, with the tousled hair in full swing.

Of course – it’s the necklace being sold we should be admiring but it all screams very sexy, and I can’t help but feel just a bit awkward.

The thing is, I just don’t know how I’m meant to respond. Am I meant to be seduced by these women selling me a T-shirt?

Are their come-hither eyes and toned abs supposed to make me run, cash in hand, to H&M?

Or maybe they’re the ideal, the women that – with just a spritz – I am sure to become, and maybe even transported to that same exotic beach that they’re lying on.

It doesn’t just stop at fashion.

The food industry has jumped on the bandwagon, yoghurt is sexy, chocolate is sexy, cereals crunch with seduction.

The thing is, sex sells – you don’t need to work in marketing to know this age-old mantra, but it’s getting worse.

Sexy adverts can as subtle as throwing a suggestive wink in your direction, or outright brazen; from the elegant, to the downright trashy.

All at the touch of a button, billboard, anywhere – open for viewing by all ages.

The problem is the blasé idea of sex that these adverts are promoting, the idea of simply: lust.

As long as chocolate bars and practically everything you can think of are there, selling sexy will continue to rise. We all remember the sensual tones of the former M&S adverts “this is not just a chicken…”, it worked, and served to show sex can even sell a chicken.

But just how far can advertising exploit the power of sex?

In a recent campaign shared throughout social media, Save The Children set out to promote and draw attention to the issue of child poverty.

The advert featured a group of attractive models with the brief to read a series of statements seductively – as though for a very sexy brand.

What started off as fairly vacant phrases: “what are your deepest desires” quickly escalated into reading cue cards saying: “Almost 800 mothers and 18,000 young children die each day, mostly from preventable causes.” All the while attempting – unsuccessfully – to maintain the same camera flirting and provocative tone.

This endorsed the idea that poverty simply can’t be made sexy, but it’s important. We can’t be seduced by poverty, unlike the way we’re seduced by materialistic frippery - in all its sensationalised glory.

Advertising is has perverted our own ideas of what sells.

This video goes to show that we expect adverts to be in seductive in some form, we expect attractive models to entice us in.

The power of desire is used as a device to get us to hand out wads of cash for practically anything.

It’s up to us to unwrap ourselves from the clasp of sexy, and be independent.