12/07/2014

I’m a bit behind on these things, so here are some of my thoughts from the last week in summary:

• Winning the award for the most perplexing cosmetics company name is Troll Cosmetics, available in a dungeon near you.
• At a make-up company’s product launch (for their new liquid foundation), the American presenter made the fatal error of trying to say what foundation actually does, namely: “It helps us to cover up our natural flaws, or as I like to call them, ‘signs of life’”. Because signs of life are to be suppressed at any cost.
• At the same launch, he unveiled the company’s vision of the “Holy Grail of Foundation”, which lay at the centre of a tripartite Venn diagram, in which one circle represented cosmetic benefits, the second skincare benefits, and the third “being good for your skin”. At least one of those last two seems redundant. Other than that, the presentation was excellent.
• In order to maximise the anti-aging power of their new skincare product, a leading cosmetic brand claims to select only 3 new orchids in every 30,000. Three quick questions.
• 1.    Do you mean 1 in every 10,000?
• 2.   Do you grow literally millions of orchids for the purposes of acquiring a couple of hundred usable ones - and if so, isn’t that a reprehensible waste of global resources?
• 3.    It’s bullshit, yeah?
• I love the way so many shop assistants latch onto the frequency with which a product is sold as an argument for why you should buy it. Maybe the fact that a Boss Bottled is purchased “alle 6 Sekunden” makes people feel they ought to get one too, just to keep the average up.
• Other than the occasional moment of indignation at the falseness of the industry, it’s been a great opening two weeks at work, learning about both the business and the art of cosmetics. I’ve had my first skin analysis, seen my first catwalk, and made my first German friends. Now bring on week three, in which I move from the glamour of the Parfümerie to 6am starts transporting crates into and out of the loading bay!

Where the presenter thinks the Holy Grail of Foundation lies.

Where it would actually lie, if it weren’t a piece of overblown nonsense.