I didn’t mean to turn into a media critic, but this is what you get when the advertisers run the same commercial 10 times during the same half-hour show.
Not sure why, but I’ve been noticing more acne medicine commercials lately. Maybe the computer has figured out that I have problem skin and is targeting me in particular with the advertising. Or maybe the world of Minority Report hasn’t arrived just yet. Not sure. Most likely this is just what happens when you watch all your TV over the Internet: Limited advertisers, so you wind up watching the same ads over and over again, ten times over the same show, until you start to deconstruct them. Either way… lotsa zit-lotion ads.
Briefly, what I find ridiculous about them.
First of all, in the middle of just about every single acne commercial, there’s a scene where the actress/model washes her face with the product. Not in a bathroom; in front of the stark white backdrop that they use for “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” ads. She’s squirted a little bit of the product on her hands, and rubs it in a circular motion on her cheeks.
She is also wearing full eye makeup. As she washes her face.
Never noticed this before, but in one of the recent ads, one of the actress/models is wearing quite a lot of eye makeup. She hasn’t gone the full raccoon. She’s just wearing the maximum allowable amount for the young twentysomething who realizes that no makeup makes her look like she’s fifteen… and she wants to stop getting carded at clubs, so she’s gonna wear enough to where nobody’s gonna mistake her for fifteen—but she’s not gonna wear so much that she looks like a panda or a Goth. )Or, which is more likely, a fifteen-year-old who got into Mommy’s makeup case.)
But it is fairly noticeable that she’s wearing a lot of the stuff. Plus, later in the commercial, her freshly glowing skin is actually as shiny and as plastic as that of a burn victim. She likely applied it with a paintbrush; no wonder she has an acne problem. But anyway: Having noticed it in the one commercial, I paid more attention and noticed it in all the commercials. Every woman has applied eye makeup before washing her face.
Now yeah, you can selectively clean one specific area of your face, like your cheeks, and avoid your eyes so that you don’t have to re-do your makeup. But that’s the second ridiculous thing: They only clean their cheeks. Rarely, but sometimes, the nose. Rarely, but sometimes, the chin. Never the forehead. Kids with regular acne tend to get it in the “T-zone,” as it’s called, the area from the forehead to the nose. Those of us with problem acne get it everywhere else too. But these actress/models seem to only get cheek zits. Freaks of nature.
The third thing is how they rinse. Standard procedure in these commercials is to take two handfuls of clear, blue-tinged water, and just fling it upwards in the general direction of your face. At this point, the camera goes into slow motion, so you can see this sheet of water just hanging in front of the actress/model’s face before it hits. They might show it touch her cheeks and nose. That’s about all.
Because, considering the volume of water she’s flung at her face, she’s going to be drenched: Her face, her hair, her shirt… You know that eye makeup that she went to all the trouble to avoid? Yeah, she better have been wearing the waterproof stuff. In any event, the commercials avoid the aftermath, because this is an acne cleanser ad, not a wet T-shirt contest. Seriously, does anyone rinse their face this way?
Fourth thing isn’t shown in every ad. Some of them show the actress/model explaining, in front of the white backdrop, how she fights acne; apparently successfully, and with some primo makeup. But she claims it’s with this amazing product. And cut to the ridiculous face-washing.
Others of them show the actress/model going through life: Shopping with friends, clubbing with friends, getting pepper-sprayed at an Occupy protest with friends… and at some point she passes a mirror, and suddenly feels the urge to check her own face for zits. She sees one, and grimaces. Cut to the white backdrop and the silly face-washing.
She sees the zit. The rest of us don’t. In part this is because it’s underneath three millimeters of foundation and she has X-ray vision. In part this is because advertisers don’t want to show an actual zit in a commercial; it’ll gross people out. It’s like those pad or diaper ads where they managed to find some space alien filled with blue bodily fluids, and they dump that upon the pad or diaper, because what you’d see in real life—a yellow or red fluid—might alienate the customers. Talk about the problem; don’t show it.
But subtly this gives you the idea that this company’s acne-cleansing product isn’t actually for real acne. It isn’t for the pizza-faced teen: It’s for the girls who get an occasional blackhead, and go, “Oooh, my porcelain complexion!” and proceed to scrub their cheeks preventatively. Meanwhile the rest of us need prescription-strength astringents before our pores grow any larger.
Yeah, commercials are stupid.