dust for sale
When I went into Sephora (a cosmetics store, for those unfamiliar with it) with Alex, I had a realization: they sell what amounts to dust. Maybe contained in another medium (i.e. a cream), but it’s all essentially “dust”. And they sell it for a lot of money. Thinking further, I thought of laser printer toner, and the similarities between cosmetics and toner: both are special “dust”, and both cost upwards of $100 for one unit/container of it. Is there something about producing this “dust” that makes it expensive, or is it just the markup the manufacturers can achieve because of our ignorance or addiction to style (in the case of toner, addiction to the name brand of the OEM)? And why isn’t there generic cosmetics, analogous to generic toner cartridges?
it seems kind of obvious to me that women are willing to spend a lot fo money on cosmetics in relation to how insecure they are about themselves. there is a cream for everything. maybe your skin is not smooth enough, or unevenly pigmented, or you have dark hair on your upper lip, or your skin is too dry or too oily, etc, etc.
there’s aslo a lot of pseudoscience, “propietary” ingredients that hold the promise of “fixing” your “problem” - and that’s just skincare.
then there is make up: it’s all about the pigments. i kind of think that, like oil paints, you DO kind of get what you pay for. cheap paint has crappy binders and dull pigments. you have to pay more for brighter, more saturated, more nuanced color. whether or not this is really detectable to an average person (and not just make up artists working in professional situations) is debatable.
the irony, or paradox of execellent make up is that it should be sort of undetectable. like terrorists, the less detectable it is, the better it is preseumed to be. like the maybelline tag line “maybe she’s born with it - maybe it’s maybelline” make up is supposed to be (to borrow another slogan from a hair coloring line) “you, only better”
no one is supposed to know that beneath this invisible armor is a less-than-perfect complexion, or whatever.
hmmmm.