Dear Ulta

Over the last four months I have been into Ulta 10 times (yes I was counting) from the express purpose of buying the product that should be in these two spaces. It has actually been on there 0/10 = 0% of those occasions.

When I ask about it the staff say that they have no input on ordering which is done by some automated central process,one that apparantly does not believe in keeping a supply of a product on hand even when it is shelf stable and has dedicated shelf space that cannot be used for any other purpose. Some uber-manager is probably really thrilled about how "efficient" this is.

I am told that I can try coming on Wednesdays when they restock and there may or may not be some of this product. Which makes me think that Ulta can go screw itself.  I try and support local brick-and-mortar stores even if they are chains, but if the feeling is not mutual Amazon here I come.

He Said What?

"Was the sex tape a seminal moment, in changing your life...." (ET Reporter to Paris Hilton)

Cosmetic Plumping

Based on my last few posts you might expect "Say No to Plumping" to be about cosmetic surgery, and it is. Sort of.

It seems even meat can't look like meat anymore. Payments are lower of you have spotted or striped pigs because the consumer doesn't know natural pigment from mold so these pigs need to be skinned before packaging. Steak is sprinkled with chemicals to help it keep a red, freshly dead color rather than a natural dark brown. And chicken is soaked in saltwater to make it fatter and heavier.

So Foster Farms makes an explicit connection between meat primping and cosmetic surgery with their "Say No to Plumping" campaign, complete with a bizarre little video with talking chickens. --"I've been thinking about having some plumping done...a lot of chicken's are having it done, Betsy." -- But, well, frankly I find chickens talking about being fatter and tastier, in the voices of chatty female friends pretty damn unappetising. If anything it makes me roll my eyes at Foster Farms.

The entire campaign website contains a total of about one page of largely unreferenced moral panic statements suggesting plumped chicken is a direct route to cardiac arrest and stomach cancer, reference to science no data actually on the site, and the whole thing excessively plumped up with talking animals. Chicken who want to be centerfold of succulant fleshiness.

Chickens are to women what public health campaign are to preachy ad campaigns--totally different things, thank you very much. (I also note that the chicken actors aren't beak or claw trimmed for our convenience. I bet all the chickens actually raised on at Foster Farms are and that whole issue worries me more than some saltwater.)

In the economic section the amount of "plump" versus real meat is calculated based on a nice heterosexual marraige with one child eating the purely speculative industry ideal of four chicken meal a week. Uh-huh. --"Plumping is deceiving, Martha."-- I am sure the idea is that natural is better. but in the end this campaign read more like a creepy male point-of-view rant about how women use cosmetics to seem more beautiful than they are, cheating the male "consumer".

Ewww.

For added "ewww" factor try replacing the word "plump" with other words in the little videos.

"The people who want to plump me say no one would ever find out".

Biore-noia

It used to be that being "too old for acne but too young for wrinkles" was called: not having a skin problem. But it seems that there is not enough money to be made from discovering a need and catering to it. Now we have to create needs, and the easiest way to create a need is to create a problem.

Enter Biore, the skin product for people who don't have skin problems. You see having skin that is neither oily nor dry is now no longer having good skin, it is having the "problem" of "in-between" skin. Don't worry, keep slathering unnecessary products on it and I am sure it will be screwed up in no time.

I mean, seriously, you cannot make this shit up: "Over acne angst? Too young for wrinkle remedies? You and 21 million other women have in between skin. We have create a space just for you ... and nobody else". Nobody else, presumably, than those other 11 million, 900 thousand and 99 other in-betweeners with whom you are meant to interact in a skin care social networking "space" based on the compulsion to treat the terrible problem of not having problem skin.

What next? The umbrella for days when it is neither rainy nor sunny? Perhaps the transparent rug for people who want the inconvenience of having some things to vacuum but still want to be able to see their floorboards. Or maybe I am just bitter because my acne and wrinkle phases decided to overlap, excluding me forever from that coveted "in between" status....

The price of beauty

I was falling a sleep when I heard a late-night TV advertisement for Latisse, a drug to lengthen and darken eyelashes. At first I thought I must have misheard. Does this seem like a good idea to you.

Latisse, unlike many beauty drugs, does seem to work but:

* Nobody knows its mechanism of action (as stated here)
* Its known side effects are that it can cause eye swelling, and brown coloration of eyelids that is (probably) reversable and brown color change or the iris of the eye which is not reversible.

No, don't get me wrong, I think people with various disorders and complaint causing hair loss could benefit. Yes, Latisse is FDA approved but this does not mean it 100% safe, it means that it can help with a disease or disorder. The Latisse site says: "LATISSE™ is an FDA-approved prescription treatment for hypotrichosis used to grow eyelashes, making them longer, thicker and darker. Hypotrichosis is another name for having inadequate or not enough eyelashes."

But the advertisement I saw was clearly aimed at encouraging purely cosmetic use by people with normal but not enormous, eyelashes--not people with a disorder effecting their eyelash appearance. Unless anyone is suggesting Brooke Shields had hypotrichosis and beauty maven Anastasia is an expert in diagnosing this condition? Who would risk an unknown drug with weird side effects when the same effect can be produced with mascara? And is it responsible to run an expensive ad campaign encouraging them to take a prescription medication instead?

The FDA clearly has in mind that this drug be used to compensate for deficits in eyebrow appearance caused by a medical condition. Anastasia seems to have something rather less humanitarian in mind when she urges women: "If you're not happy with the lashes you were born with — and let's face it, many of us aren't — LATISSE™ is a great option that delivers real results."

The message is: want more, get more, imitate celebrities, follow the prescription advice celebrity beauticians, give us your money, take drugs you don't understand, hope you don't get sick. Only beauty is important. I am not at all surprise to see this is brought to us by Allergan, makers of Botox, wrinkle-filling injections and fake boobs. All of which have reconstructive surgey uses, but I doubt that is where the "real" money is made.

Kudos to Covergirl...

The Good:

Covergirl has broken the mold a little in using Ellen Degeneres as their latest "covergirl".

The Ungood

Amazon is removing Amazon rankings from books considered too "adult". Like Ellen Degeneres's biography.

[OT] Tsunamis: Not Just Metaphor--Not a Just Metaphor

Connecting the Quiksilver brand to the Microsoft brand = dumb
Having anything to do with he phrase "economic tsunami" = horrible



Words may just be words, but you do not surf a Tsunami. An image of a surfing goods CEO surfing a tsunami is not just profoundly ignorant of surfing, it is profoundly insensitive, smug, affluent-centric and just plain naff. It may have been 4 whole years, but over 200,000 deaths should still raise the word "tsunami" above the level of glib soundbites. What next, "economic 9/11", "economic holocaust"?

[picture excerpted from an award winning picture by Arko Datta shown here]