‘Why do you want to be pretty? Pretty girls are ten-a-penny. Being pretty just means you disappear in the crowd. What you have is much more than that.’
Clever lad! And it had me thinking today – yet again – about the cosmetics industry. They have spent the last heaven knows how many decades ‘developing’ new products (they like the word ‘develop’; it makes even a worthless activity sound important.) They pay celebrity models huge sums to advertise them. They have cruelly tortured and killed countless millions of innocent animals in the process. And all for what? To persuade people to the patently absurd notion that beauty is skin deep, and that using the latest bottle of chemicals will make them even more beautiful. The products that were around fifty years ago would do the odd little enhancement job just as well as all those that have come and gone in the interim.
Surely, there can be few industries like the cosmetics one for demonstrating just how outrageously foolish and self-delusional modern culture can be. And before anybody tells me that people were using make up five thousand years ago, I know. But what they did was use a few simple, natural products in order to follow the latest style. The two things are very different.
2 comments:
Modern culture can be so vacuous. But that's the way the world works, and we can't do anything about it. I feel so bad for the animals that have to suffer the experiments- and it's not just the cosmetics industry, either- it's the fur industry too! It's despicable. And all in the name of fashion, and simply to follow the latest trends.
Join the club, Lu. I watched something on the TV once, in which the head of a National Park in America was defending the hunting of bears by saying 'We've calculated (calculated!) that we can afford to harvest 10% of them.' Harvest?! Think of the implication of that choice of word.
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