Bending Space, Time and the Truth

Actors standing around in white coats telling us if pain persists, insult your doctor. Institutes conjured out of nowhere to give the illusion that it’s more than just shampoo. Charts with no values on the X and Y axis and CG to convince us it really can drive out toxins while enhancing elasticity.

I truly dislike pseudo-science in marketing. My hatred is reinforced by a mate who has a similar dislike so we get to bolster each other’s righteous rage. His bete noir is made up chemical names in cosmetics.

The snake-oil salesmen down at L’Oreal have lathered so much foundation on the acne-scarred face of truth that, glancing at their advertisement on the back of a magazine this morning, I spat my sachet porridge* out in laughter.

On the back of a monthly glossy, I saw an ad for a product called New Lash Architect 4D.

“Be magnetic with the power of lash sculpting fibres! The false lash effect steps into 4D!”

Holy 1.21 gigawatts – four freakin’ D!

Like L’Oreal suggests, let’s step into this. We can arrange the Ds in any order, even the fourth when you really get your head around it, because it is literally, all relative.

The space-time continuum.

First dimension: Width.

Second dimension: Height.

Third dimension: Depth.

Fourth dimension: Time.

The geniuses (not overusing the word here, obviously) at the L’Oreal labs, the one where they spell Paris PARiS, have moved women’s eyelashes out of the constraints of everyday, physical laws and have somehow introduced quantum effects into a bottle of mascara. I bet the guys over at the Large Hadron Collider are pretty embarrassed?

It’s all totally backed up and legit though, because Milla Jovovich puts her name to it and I’ve seen a documentary where she saved the planet armed with nothing more than a multi-pass and orange dreadlocks. Because she’s worth it.

The boffins at the CERN facilities (Division L’Oreal) haven’t finished with their comedy stylings just yet, though. There’s a small-print disclaimer. “Photographed with lash inserts for consistency.”

In other words, our Hawkings-Neutrino Mascara is terrific, but here’s a photo of Milla with falsies on.

Milla opines, “My eyes stand out from any angle! Captivating…” but when someone says their eyes can stand out at any angle, I think of snails or cubism… but back to the photo of Milla. The more I look at it, the more it could be anyone. The photo is so shopped it’s as meaningless as the rest of the bullshit on the page.

This ad is not in itself important. I don’t think they test make-up by forcing it into the eyes of bunnies anymore and it helps people to be good looking and I find good looking people intrinsically entertaining. If I ignore the amount of money that leaves the household budget to buy it, I am not anti-make-up. But these ads are an excellent example of how the rot sets in.

We are currently in the middle of a relentless public brawl about climate change. There are dodgy claims being made in every direction you care to look, from Abbott saying that carbon is weightless; so how could we measure it, to the unfair amount of media time those on the fringes of the debate get, compared to the vast majority of considered scientific research. The appearance the argument is balanced is wrong.

We don’t help ourselves though, by inuring ourselves to credible science and reasonable argument by allowing the type of dross that L’Oreal peddles to surround us.

In case you were wondering, according to L’Oreal the fourth dimension is, and I quote, “Curl”.

Strangely enough – that could turn out to be true when the real scientists get down to it, but it won’t be because of the ground breaking research done at the Ponds Institute.

*Sachet porridge. Nearly a third of its weight in sugar, but according to the man who slows down time in the TV ad, it helps you get your kids to school punctually because you are too busy to cook real oats.