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10월 23일 A Power Tool for GalsOf course I'm talking about a vibrating mascara. What else could it be? For the unenlightened gender among you, mascara is an integral part of a woman's life -- if she only has 30 seconds to put on some makeup before rushing out the door in the morning, she would put on mascara alone. (So next time you see a girl with luxurious long lashes and think she's born with it -- remember what your friend Jackie told you: it's Maybelline.) But what distinguishes this mascara, called "Maybelline Pulse Perfection", is that it has a small built-in motor engine, so when you touch a button, it delivers 7000 vibrations per minute, which promises efficient separation, lengthening, and curling of the lashes. The operating word here is "efficient" -- because who wouldn't want a motor engine to accomplish what you so painfully have to do yourself? I found myself liking this pulsating mascara a lot so thought it would be fun to share.  Oh I almost forgot to add that, according to the newly released yet already much-maligned FTC guidelines for bloggers, I must disclose any money or freebie received for my product reviews, or pay a $11,000 fine. Not that I'm such a popular blogger that companies line up outside my door and wrestle with each other to curry favor with me -- unless my 11 readers yesterday were Bill Gates, Larry Ellison and 9 Saudi princes, any investment in bribing me would result in a very negative ROI. But I did get this mascara quite serendipitously and supposedly for free, and that took quite a story to explain. This past summer, I attended a consortium hosted by L'Oreal at their New York City headquarters, where they invited a bunch of management academics to sit around and talk about their assorted brands such as L'Oreal, Maybelline, Yves Saint Laurent, Garnier and Lancome. And this Maybelline Pulsating Mascara was in the goodie bag I received as a thank-you gift, which also contained miscellaneous bottles of shampoos, hair balms, body lotions and such. Of course I was more than thrilled to receive this treasure-packed bag. Not to mention that last time I was invited to a Google conference on its Mountain View campus, all I walked away with was a Gmail account. But as the Zen master often warns, "don't judge good or bad too quickly", an unforeseen problem soon arose: the next leg of my trip was to fly from NYC to Salt Lake City. Of course there was no way I could pack this pandemonium of toiletries into a quart-size, clear plastic zip-top bag as required by the TSA, so my only option was to check it in with the United Airlines at a price of $20. (By the way, is there any constitutional law attorney who happens to be reading this blog? I have a business proposal: we can file a lawsuit against TSA and major airlines as co-conspirators in sex discrimination. Our argument before the Supreme Court justices would go like this: there is a much higher chance that women have to exceed that quart-size limit in toiletries and therefore compelled to check in their bags with the airlines, who ruthlessly take advantage of this by charging exorbitant luggage fees -- consequently, women on average are forced to pay more than men for air travel. Can't you see how it promises to be a precedent-setting, career-making, money-grabbing case in anti-discrimination laws? Who cares about firefighters in New Haven anyway?) Sorry about the digression -- I guess my work lately has made me a bit litigious. But the bottom line was that I had to pay $40 round-trip for a bag of "freebies" that I would not otherwise pay $40 for at CVS. Hence the irony. The Economist in me wants to quote Milton Friedman, who said "there's no such thing as a free lunch". But the Writer in me wants to quote Sebastian Horsley, who said, "the difference between sex for money and sex for free is that sex for money always costs a lot less." The coolest thing about truth, I feel, is that, rather than a boring fact or dogma set in stone, it is a mutable, oftentimes all-encompassing structure with a sly sense of humor: in this case, you can Ctrl+F "sex" and replace it with "waterproof mascara", and it still holds water! Hmm, thanks to the FTC, now the disclaimer can be so much more fun than the product review itself. 댓글 (2개)
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