It's Time To Squash The Bug

(Because a lot of outside material I've used for this post will be triggering in terms of trans phobia, hate speech, and violent threats, I've linked them instead of putting in screenshots. Please don't click through if you feel these links might be harmful to you)

I'm going to get into some pretty heavy feminist politics today, so while I know some of you are tempted to flick past this entry, I'd ask that you stay and hear me out, at least for a little while. This is super important stuff, and the whole point of this post is to try and spread information about some of the heinous shit going on out there in the name of feminism to people who might not be aware.

A lot of my readers will already know a lot of what I'll be writing out here, so consider this a primer that you can link to people who ask what the hell you're on about when you talk about TERF's. But if you're one of those people who tries to stay out of politics, to stay out of "Capital F" Feminism, I'd ask that just this once, you listen for a minute. I promise there will be more pretty pictures later - but today I want to get serious.

Primed and Ready

I'd apologise for the terrible pun in the title, but I'm not sorry at all. I ADORE puns, the worse the better.

As you may have guessed, I've decided to do a little comparison post of some eye primers. I'm still not entirely convinced that a face primer under makeup is really necessary (especially since I almost always use BB cream rather than foundation) but since my little obsession with loose eyeshadow has started up I've discovered that under loose eyeshadow at least, primer is a must.

The Good, The Bad, and the Horrific of Customer Service

The basic principles of customer service always seemed to be pretty straightforward to me, but it's become pretty clear to me lately that a lot  of companies just don't have the first clue how to treat customers in such a way that they are actually likely to return willingly. I find it hard to believe so many businesses employ people who have no interest or ability to treat customers pleasantly - that just doesn't make sense to me. There can't possibly be that many clueless people in the world. The alternative is that a lot of businesses are actively turning away and discouraging potential and current customers because they're not the kind of customers they want, for whatever reason. Maybe they're too fat, or too poor, or too black, or too gender ambiguous. Whatever the reasons, this is a completely ludicicrous business model. The global marketplace is packed with alternatives to whatever you happen to be selling, and it's getting more crowded by the day. The ability to sell things online has made the number of potential businesses in any given marketplace virtually limitless, and I've heard a lot of brick and mortar storefront companies complaining that this is ruining their businesses. In my opinion, this is complete nonsense. Online stores are only taking business away from brick and mortar stores because they've been treating their customers so badly for so long that customers are fleeing now they have a choice about it. Sure, you have to wait ages for stuff ordered online, and you can't try it on, and sometimes it's not at all what you thought it would be like - and STILL customers are fleeing brick and mortar stores. The way they treat a lot of their customers has been SO BAD that all the downsides of online shopping are still preferable. When the prices are higher, and the hours you can shop there are restricted, pretty much the only upside that brick and mortar stores have over online stores is the immediacy of the purchase, and face to face customer service. But it seems a lot of them can't even get that right, even though it's almost all they have to draw in business.

Cosmetic Marketing and the BFF Style

I thought my post on the Dove Beauty Sketches ad was so late to the party that it might be the last one - but apparently the debate continues to rage. Well, actually, calling it a debate seems a bit disingenuous. The vast majority of the articles I've read have decried it as being exclusionary, too focused on beauty as the core of a woman's self worth, and being sneaky wolfish marketing dressed up in "activist" sheep's clothing. I'm not interested in arguing the moral value of marketing companies attempting to appeal to our self esteem in order to sell products - although you should feel free to do so in the comments if you like. However, I do find the psychology of this type of "friendship" marketing endlessly fascinating, and I have a great example of this kind of marketing done horribly wrong to share with you today.

Loyalty based, "friendship" style marketing is at the core of what Dove is attempting with their Natural Beauty campaigns. They're trying to convince us they're not a soulless corporation that only wants to sell lotions - they're our friends. * They want us to feel good about ourselves (and buy their soap), they want us to be happy and successful (and buy their soap), just like our real friends. They tell us we really are beautiful, no matter what we tell ourselves, just like our real friends. And in turn, they hope we will reward the company like we do our real friends - with our loyalty and commitment. They hope that we will forgive their mistakes and support their endeavours, just like we would a real friend. And the thing is, regardless of whether it's morally right or wrong, this type of marketing isn't going anywhere because it works like WHOA.

Loyal customers bring in tons of bags just like this.

Post Oscars Bile

So the internet today is full of rage at Seth McFarland - in case you somehow managed to miss it, he hosted the Oscars this year and said some awful things. I wasn't surprised by this in the slightest - pissing people off in the name of humour is what MacFarlane is known for. You hire Prince, and you're going to get kick ass noodly guitar solos, you hire MacFarlane and you're going to get offensive jokes. I'm not interested in debating whether what he said was right or wrong - everything people are outraged by is totally fair and understandable. What I don't think is right is that all the blame is sitting squarely on MacFarlane.

Not a lone gunman

Fuck your Femme Passivity

One of the reasons I stayed away from all things femme for so long was because of the percieved association of femme and weakness, passivity, standing back and letting things happen. I am not that sort of girl - I never have been. There is a t-shirt sold by T Shirt Hell that says, "If I had balls, they would be bigger than yours", and it was one of my favourite things to wear out for a long time. I assumed (because I didn't know any better) that if I started getting interested in being pretty, getting my nails did, all that junk, that I would have to give up being a bad ass. As it turns out, I was totally wrong, and I am so fucking happy about that. But every now and then something turns up that reminds me why I made those assumptions in the first place.

I don't really do Tumblr. I don't understand it, I don't understand what it's FOR, and that annoys me, so I generally keep away from it - although there is now a Reluctant Femme tumblr, just so I have somewhere to push all these posts and my Instagram pictures into the same stream. This distrust/disinterest in Tumblr means I missed the kerfuffle around this particular musician, who used to go by Kitty Pryde but is now apparently just Kitty, because this is meant to make people take her more seriously. Let's have a look at one of her clips and have a little talk about why she pisses me the fuck off.

Organic My Ass - Part 1

Rejoice science geeks, it's another exciting installment of Show Your Working! Today we'll be looking at the increasingly valuable label "organic", and what it actually means it terms of cosmetics.

(spoiler alert: very little)

I'll be doing this in two sections, one for Australia and one for the US, because the relevant legislation is quite different, and putting it together would turn this into a Masters essay rather than a blog post.

Before we really get into the nitty gritty, I just want to put it out there that I don't actually give a damn if something is organic or not, so please don't try and start a comment war on the pros and cons. I just...I don't care. I know, I know, I should, and it's probably better for me, but honestly when you have as many allergies as me, adding extra restrictions to what you consume is just more effort than I have in me. (In case you were wondering, my complete list of allergies is currently dairy, gluten, alcohol, peanuts, seafood, aspartame and related fake sugars) Also, I smoke, for heavens sake. Unless I quit sucking in noxious chemicals five times a day, the amount of parabens in my mascara is pretty moot.

BUT I know that it's really important to other people - people like David Lynch, who made a brilliant ad for his signature coffee blend, in which he points out several times that it's both organic and fairly traded. It's also incredibly creepy.

Because I'm a much less compassionate person than I should be, every time I hear someone ask if something is fairly traded, I can't help but hear it in Lynch's weird Barbie voice, and then I can't possibly take them seriously anymore.

However, something that I DO care about rather a lot is truth in advertising. I was enormously pleased to see Estee Lauder coming up against a class action for using misleading claims on their Clinique products, and I wish that sort of thing happened more often. Pseudo science claims like the kind used by Physicians Formula for their "happy blush" make me so angry I virtually froth at the mouth. Way back in the way back times I used to be part of the marketing industry, and one of the reasons I would never go back is the incredible amount of dishonesty involved in the way products are marketed.

EUPHORYL(TM) IS NOT A REAL THING. The marketing department MADE IT UP.

Stop talking to us like we're idiots

Welcome to the inaugural post of a series I'm starting called Show Your Working, in which I apply scientific rigour and common sense to various aspects of cosmetics.

One of the things that has kept me away from beauty products and the entire beauty industry for so long is the widespread habit of marketing to their consumers like they're blithering idiots. Instead of just telling us what the product does, they make outrageous, totally unverifiable claims, and then try and make us feel like it's our fault if the product doesn't do what they promised.

Here is the example that is annoying the piss out of me right now - The Clairsonic.

There are many annoyances like it, but this one is my annoyance

It's basically a very fine brush that whizzes around very, very fast, to clean your skin. If they just SAID that, I wouldn't have as much of a problem. But it's all the nonsense they add on that makes me so angry.
Let's start with the liberal usage of "sonic".  Reading this, and knowing what "sonic" actually means (involving, or producing sound OR having a speed equal to that of sound in air), I would expect that this product would claim to be beaming some sort of sonic signal into your skin to make it prettier. So I had a read through the marketing material, expecting a good chuckle at the outrageous claims.

There's lots about how it's really good at cleaning stuff off your skin - which is fair enough. I imagine a rapidly spinning brush WOULD be very good for cleaning your skin, much as an electric toothbrush is better than a normal hand powered one. But all the marketing material reads to me like they expect their audience to be so stupid as to not notice that they plaster "sonic" all over it, without any sort of explanation as to what is "sonic" about it, or why that's good. Even the section on the site entitled "Sonic Benefits" has no mention of any effect that could be attributed to anything other than a rapidly spinning brush. There is ONE mention of "sonic" in relation to the actual function of the device, here;
"Clarisonic Sonic Skin Cleansing Systems use a patented sonic frequency of more than 300 movements per second."
So it doesn't claim to make any sound. Which means it must be sonic because it moves 300 times per second? That's...that's not sonic either. It's SUBSONIC, but I suppose that doesn't sound as good.
(edit: I have been informed this speed of movement DOES in fact qualify this as moving at "sonic" speed. I still don't see what benefit that is supposed to offer though, unless skin cells are running away from it so fast it needs to move faster than sound)
This all means it's really just a rapidly spinning brush for polishing off the dead skin on your face. 

SO WHY NOT JUST SAY THAT.

One of the reasons I am happy to give Lush all of my money is because they DON'T engage in this kind of nonsense. I go in there, ask what a cream does, and the staff say "It makes your skin feel soft, and smell good." And I'm all, "Hell yes, give me some of that." I don't feel ripped off because I know what I'm paying for - the products they have are expensive because certain ingredients are hella expensive. They don't tell me it will do something it won't. They don't fuck me around, and I appreciate that with my wallet.

As I said before, I imagine a rapidly spinning brush WOULD be pretty good at cleaning your skin. But why do they not even bother to provide any sort of practical claim on this front? They compare cleansing with the product to cleansing with "your hands alone" - I don't know about you, but I tend to use soap and water, and maybe even a washcloth if I'm feeling fancy. I've never tried to clean my face with "hands alone." But semantics aside, it seems like a perfectly sellable product. So why talk to us like we're stupid?

I've been doing a lot of reading lately about beauty products and makeup advice etc, in preparation for being able to write something of worth in this blog. And I've noticed that there is a certain pattern of language that goes across all the advertising, and even leaks into the blogs that cover this sort of thing. There is an assumption created by the advertising, and accepted by a lot of the consumers, that if the product doesn't work, it's your fault. You're not putting it on right. You didn't use the right moisturiser. It's not for your skin type. You've got too many blemishes. You didn't brush your skin with a two hundred dollar nailbrush first. Your skin is too "impure". It's your fault.

Take this from the Clairsonic website;
"Typical manual cleansing can leave behind dirt and oil trapped in pores. This build-up can damage the appearance and health of your skin and keep your skin care products from working like they should."

"They're eating my beauty!"

I love that with one sentence, they manage to acknowledge that skin products DON'T work, but still manages to place the blame for this squarely on the consumer.  If only I had known this before - I'm not cleaning my face right, and THAT'S why my stupidly expensive face cream isn't erasing my wrinkles like I was promised it would. It's not because erasing my wrinkles with a cream is a physical impossibility. It's because I don't have this thing! *facepalm* How could I have been so silly? 

It sounds ridiculous when I put it like this, but you read enough of this kind of babble and it starts to make sense. You see it enough places, and it feels like YOU'RE the crazy one. It reminds me of the disorientation I felt after being in Paris for a day or so when I spoke very little French. The signs are in french, the movies are all in French, everyone around me is speaking French...I began to have this weird paranoia in the back of my head that English was just a delusion. That's how I feel when reading these beauty product writeups. There are so many wildly spurious claims, (my favourite is "It really made a difference!" without specifying what KIND of difference) padded out with pseudo scientific mumbo jumbo that you feel like you must be the one who is stupid. We, as consumers, are not as stupid as they treat us. If they just SAY "it cleans your skin really well," we can follow that. If they put in a little diagram comparing it to an electric toothbrush, even better. All perfectly rational, straightforward explanation. But why claim it's "sonic"? JUST TELL ME WHAT IT DOES!!
So much of this material is a conversation that spirals inwards like a fractal, until it makes no sense whatsoever to an outside observer, but the blame is still on you for not following them down the rabbit hole.

And it drives me mad.

Reading these marketing spiels to my boy is my favourite way to see them from an entirely outside light for the complete jibberish they are. He's not interested in makeup in the slightest - he notices if I wear it, but doesn't give a damn if I don't. He doesn't read the magazines, or the advertising, or the blogs. He comes from a delightfully straightforward point of view on these things.
Here's a transcript of me reading the Clairsonic site out loud, and his helpful commentary.

Me: Used and recommended by spas and dermatologists...
The Boy: Which ones?
Me: It doesn't say.
The Boy: Is this like the "many doctors" who told the Republicans you couldn't get pregnant from rape, when it was actually just one total nutcase?
Me:...ANYWAY, apparently Clarisonic Sonic Skin Cleansing Systems use a patented sonic frequency of more than 300 movements per second...
The Boy: That's not sonic. I mean, I'm not a physicist, but I'm pretty sure that's not sonic.
Me: ...to gently, yet thoroughly remove 6X more makeup and 2X more dirt and oil than cleansing with your hands alone.
The Boy: With your hands? LIKE A HEATHEN!!
Me: Cleaner skin is the first step toward healthier skin. And healthier skin is smoother, more radiant and more beautiful.
The Boy: So it's a fancy cleaner then.
Me:...yes. 
The Boy: So why does it cost $200?
Me: Um...it polishes your skin?
The Boy: Like a table?
Me: Ah...sort of?
The Boy: Let me read the testimonials....*grabs the laptop*
The Boy: ''I don't feel clean unless I brush my face!?" What the hell?! Are you a horse? "My skin actually feels like it can breathe, something ordinary cleansing missed the mark on." Maybe if you didn't trowel on a layer of spak filler to try and hide your hideous pores, you wouldn't need to take the top layer of your skin off to feel clean! And this one, " I've already received several comments in the last 2 weeks since the purchase about how great my skin looks". Correlation is not causation, LADY.
Me: *At this point laughing too hard to continue the conversation*


So that's how I deal with an overload of this kind of nonsense, when I feel like the whole world is speaking French and my desire for clear, straightforward explanation of what something actually DOES makes me the only English speaker.

I just wish I didn't have to. 

Missha Signature Wrinkle Filler BB Cream Fills Your Wrinkles wWth Bullshit

One of the things that dragged me back into femme and makeup and all this stuff is the emergence of BB Creams in the western marketplace. Apparently this stuff has been floating around Korea for years, but it eventually started trickling through to the western markets, where it's popularity promptly exploded once a certain critical mass of adulation among the "right" people occurred. To be honest, I find the excitement over it being a "foreign", "exotic" product kind of tacky. The way some people talk about them, it comes across like our neighbors in the mysterious East have been hiding beauty secrets in the sleeves of their kimonos, away from prying Western eyes, which makes me uncomfortable to say the least.
So why am I dabbling with this stuff at all? Most of the reports of it being a "miracle" product base this claim on the idea that it will replace your toner, primer, foundation, concealer blah blah etc to infinity, which of COURSE you are already using. And now you can just use one thing!! As someone who has virtually no interest in using any of these things on a regular basis, this hardly seems like a miracle. However, it is an appealing option between "proper" makeup (which takes way too long to do every day) and just eyeshadow and mascara (which looks adequate, but takes two seconds).
The factor that really convinced me to dip a toe into the confusing, seething, morass of choice that is BB cream was just one simple ingredient - sunscreen.
Australia is a bright fucking country, and I am extremely pale. I also have a ton of moles, and a history of cancer in the family - I really REALLY should wear sunscreen. But, at the risk of sounding pathetic, I don't because it feels ooky on my skin. It's all greasy and/or sticky, and it makes my hands greasy and/or sticky and it makes me all shiny and gives me pimples. Well, maybe. It might. I know, I know, I'm a sook. So this is why I started looking into BB Creams - because I am a total sook about sunscreen, I really should wear it, and these apparently have SPF as well as looking pretty. So you know, why not?

Well, for starters, because there are approximately a BILLION different brands, and that's just if you're restricting yourself to the Korean formulas. I chose to do this because my skin is actually pale enough to match the Korean idea of "pale", and from hanging around forums of serious makeup people I got the impression the Korean formulas offer more in the way of actually making your skin look better. If I'm going to spend five minutes of my precious morning wakefulness putting goop on my skin, I want to at least make a visible difference.
If your skin is anything warmer than Goth White, you're going to want to investigate the Western BB creams, because despite the claims that the Korean brands "match" your skin, I think this is an enormous lie.
I ordered a bunch of samples from Ebay, which seems to be the most cost-efficient way to go about this sort of experimenting. No matter how many reviews you read, you can never tell how something is going to actually sit on your skin, and there is way more variety of formula between different brands than I would have ever guessed. Some are like water colour paints, some are thick and dense like expensive hand cream, and there are others that are every gradient in between. The only thing to keep in mind when messing around with these is that they're not meant to be a proper foundation - none of them will cover every little tiny pore and speck and look "properly" made up - it's not what they're designed for. They're designed to make you look like you've had a little bit more sleep than you have actually had, and that your skin is actually a teeny bit more "perfect" than it is.
I have come across some that I actually really liked, that look almost as good as doing the whole primer-concealer-foundation-powder dance - but today I want to talk about one I hated. Missha make some great stuff, but their Missha Signature Wrinkle Filler BB Cream is going straight into my Bullshit Bin.

The sample packet looks like the full size bottle! How sickeningly cute!!

You can get this stuff quite easily on Ebay, and Sing-Sing-Girl not only has a huge range of samples for very small prices, but her shipping is quite fast (for an international order). Plus she wrote a little thank you note and put it in my order, and I am SUCH a sucker for that kind of personal touch. 

I'm not going to do photos of what it looks like coming out of the packet because, well, I am going to go ahead and assume you can all imagine what a blob of pale pink goo looks like. Instead, here are some pictures of my face with it on.

As I said above, I don't expect this stuff to cover my under eye bags entirely, just make it look like I've gotten a little more sleep than I have. And it more or less did. If I squinted or stood right back, I looked a teensy bit less blotchy. Maybe a little bit moister, what ads would probably call luminous. That's it. Not exactly a life changing experience, and certainly not enough visible difference to encourage me to spend five precious morning minutes putting it on when I could be packing my lunch instead. To be honest, I actually had a little trouble telling the before and after shots apart when resizing them.

The real down side is what happened to it once it had been sitting on my skin for more than ten minutes. Suddenly my face felt all greasy, like when you've been eating hot chips and gotten your hands all smeary and then rubbed your hair out of your eyes. So I get a tissue to get the icky oil off, carefully blotting, not wiping, like the internet told me to. Hurrah, I thought! Oil gone, problem solved.
Then the itching started. Not full on "I am being eaten alive by mosquitoes"  just a niggling, slightly burning itch that came up in the corners of my nose and behind my glasses, where I imagine there was small amounts of sweat mixing with the cream. I figured a tingling itch when damp was probably a bad sign, and pottered off to the bathroom to have a poke around my face.
Imagine my annoyance to discover that not only was the cream now not covering shit, it had actually separated into waves of greasy chip oil, leaving gritty little sandy bits in their wake. GROSS, GROSS, GROSS, GEDDITOFF!

Calm down, I thought. It's just worn off. You just need to reapply. You remember reading about reapplying. That's a thing that you sometimes have to do with gunk on your face. It's all good. No need to declare this a complete failure yet.
So I patted my face until I had gotten off all the gritty bits I could, and dutifully reapplied. And you know what?

AN HOUR LATER IT WAS EXACTLY THE SAME.

As soon as I got home I scrubbed my face furiously to GEDDITOFF, and later that evening was STILL finding little gritty bits in the corners of my nose.  So I won't be getting any more of that. Not only did it not do anything I wanted it to do, it gave me all the unpleasant side effects of a trip to the beach without the joy of playing in the waves.

INTO THE BIN!!