Thursday, March 10, 2005

lesson #63: much ado about Mabel

It's been like a marathon. Non-stop rushing for projects. I can't believe that just five days ago, I was working my ass off doing MA project. Staring at the same Excel worksheet for 12 solid hours. Feels like it happened eons ago. After I was done with MA, I only had a couple of hours' break time before I had to get started on BGS (that stands for Business, Government, and Society, by the way. The following statement may or may not have been said. BGS is the most pointless, useless, cock-n-bull, complete waste of time of a subject there is). So it's been late nights at school for the past few days for me. Haven't been leaving school before at least 10 pm.


Not that I'm complaining. I've got no time to complain. Tomorrow will be the last stretch of the marathon. My group will be doing our presentation on Consumer Protection in Singapore versus Malaysia. (Sounds boring? Try actually doing it). Hopefully the video we did for the presentation will come through nicely.


Let's not talk about school stuff anymore. I came across an interesting trivia yesterday. This guy Thomas mixed Vaseline and coal together to make his sister's eyes look prettier, because his sister, called Mabel, wanted to catch the attention of a guy called Chet. Hence he invented the first ever mascara. With the mascara applied, Mabel didn't only catch the eyes of Chet, but also his heart. Thomas then started a company called Mabelline.


I can't seem to think that there's a false connection between wearing mascara and getting a guy to fall in love with you. What if Mabel's looks were already striking in the first place? Or what if Chet fell in love (supposedly) with her not because of her eyes, but because of other factors (like, you know, that little insignificant thing called personality)? Another point: imagine a superbly ugly girl without mascara. Now imagine her with mascara. If she's really really ugly in the first place, simply wearing mascara isn't gonna help her much. Miracles DON'T happen like that.


Anyway, I read the trivia on the papers. It was part of a huge Mabelline advert. A niggling point about the way they use the trivia. It seems to imply that since Mabelline invented the first mascara, the mascara that they're producing NOW must be of excellent / first quality. After all, they started it! They came up with the original formula! But as a matter of fact, whoever invented the first mascara isn't really of relevance today. The components of mascara have developed since then, and although Mabelline may have started it, others have caught up throughout the years and superseded Mabelline in terms of quality. You can't compare Mabelline to say, Helena Rubinstein. Even L'oreal is better than Mabelline!


So using that piece of trivia as part of the advert is really quite a deceitful thing to do, especially if a girl (or guy, possibly) who's never heard of mascara before is suddenly induced to buy Mabelline products because she (or he) was taken in by the story.


Now back to memorizing my nice BGS speech.