Mascara Media

You can see transparency everywhere these days. Politicians invoke it, social media pundits praise it, journalists make it their calling, everyone seems to trade in it.

Even the beauty industry is getting into the act.

There is a new L'Oreal Paris television ad for the company's Volumizing Power 24 Hour Mascara Brush that's now running. And running fast. It is a vivid, highly produced message, a mixture of tight shots of a model's luscious, thick-lashed eye and bold, moving, colour graphics. Funky fonted words, including VOLUME and COLLAGEN, leave me with the suggested equation that this mascara stick = this model's eyes.

Except that's not the whole story.

Because four brief times in the commercial is a disclaimer, written in footnote-size type, that what you see isn't quite what you get.

"Lashes were enhanced in post-production and filmed with lash inserts."

 Or, with volume up: "Lashes were enhanced in post-production and filmed with lash inserts."

I have never seen anything quite like that, not that I watch mascara brush commercials all that closely. Now, it would be interesting to find out how that footnote came to be; specifically, if it was self-imposed or at the direction of and internal or external truth-in-advertising tribunal of some kind.

But even more interesting is the ad agency's apparent conclusion that the footnote doesn't matter. That running it four times doesn't matter. That one kind of media obliterates another. And that lifeless, immovable, rational print is no match for the emotion of video with a soundtrack and its favourite subject, the human face.

But there is still a duty in the eye of the beholder.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Hello!

Image
The potential socialness of a bicycle is built right into its roofless and windshieldless and doorless frame. It is easy to say hello on a bicycle. Like this morning. These sidewalkers nodded to me in unison at the exact instant I nodded to them. I said hello to the jogger, and he waved back. Hi, I said, to the dog walkers and the dog, and they nodded a greeting back. Both joggers smiled and said hello as our lives passed. I said hello to the squirrel. I said hello to the woman walking with poles and she returned the hello. The jogger looked over and I said hello as she said hello. I said hello to this fellow egg picker upper and we talked for a couple of minutes. Her bicycle comes out April 1. She is excited. Hello, I said. Hi, she said. I said hello to the  man on the other end of this leash and he said he and his dog were enjoying the beautiful morning. I said hello to this woman and she said hello, and we laughed ab
Read more

:)

Image
One of the joys and dangers of studying in the MACT program is that you start to feel scared enough to feel confident enough to fool around and try simple new things with technology. The danger is that you're not good enough not to spend most of your time fiddling around doing those things. And, so, this morning I am proud to announce that, taken by the hand, I have managed to embed html vimeo code into my blog. Please, no applause. This is not much, I know. Your basic 8 year old can do more. Asleep. But it is a minor accomplishment for me, because of me. And how I get in the way with my pre-wired reaction that new things won't work. The effect of that kind of thinking (or that lack of thinking) is that I transform the machine in front of me into an antagonistic force working to undo me. But it does remind me of me when I attribute malevolence to the skies when they conspire to bring rain on a morning of golf! Either way, that's bad storytelling. On another leve
Read more

On the way to and from Coffee Outside

Image
I have wondered about the the flight to artifice when natural beauty is encountered. Standing in front of a mountain vista, I will routinely offer some version of, wow, it looks like a painting! Or like a postcard. Or that is just out of a movie! This morning as I pedalled in the MacKinnon Ravine the April snow felt etched onto the limbs of the trees. I have often felt dissatisfied with this transposing of the beauty out there into the key of human making.  But, maybe, painting and photography and engraving and the rest of the human arts are as natural to us, as lovely, as nature itself. Or, maybe, so entwined that it is hard to tell nature and art apart. My bicycle has certainly transported me to feelings of freedom I would not have achieved were it not a piece of technology.  Who are we, really?                                                                           At the turn at the bottom of the ravine, a plastic orange fence encircles a soggy sink
Read more