live in skin

I’m not sure about the rest of you cats, but I’ve often wondered about the myriad of beauty products sold to women. There’s lotions, peels, scrubs, masks, ointments, salves, salts, dyes, and a few others I have no way of categorizing without a degree in chemical engineering.

The Red Queen is an esthetician by trade and our bathrooms (yes, we have two) are filled to capacity with just about every known beauty aid ever invented. While her constant pursuit of beauty is admirable, the fact that I barely have room in the bathroom for my razors is a testament to how seriously she takes this particular addiction.

This is an area where men and women differ, of course. A guy might NEED a toothbrush, some toothpaste, a razor, deodorant, some soap, shampoo (if he has hair), some conditioner (if he believes the hype about the two part process of hair maintenance), and a towel. For the most part, guys are low-maintenance, unless he’s a metro-sexual, then he might NEED some lotion, one or two different colognes, and a luffa. I’m of the former group. Which is to say I’m about as low maintenance as you can get without being in a coma. Sure, I’ve got some level of vanity… I mean, I’ve shorn off all my hair rather than watch it all fall out on its own. I’ll admit that I took my queue from Bruce Willis, but the truth is my options were limited: it was either the comb over or invest heavily in Minoxidil. The bottom line, and the one I’m trying to get at here, is that men use a fraction of the personal care products that women do.

Women will buy just about every crackpot invention ever made so long as it claims to either beautify or restore her skin, hair, nails, or teeth to their pre-pubescent splendor. I know there are a few of my regular readers, women anyway… and maybe limey, who pay an extraordinary amount of attention to their appearance. I would imagine that it probably started shortly after they found their first gray hair or crowsfoot near the eyes. I know that the women’s magazines (which for the most part are produced, written, and edited by women, for women) tend to push the younger is better line and mostly because they are in part funded by the advertising dollars paid by the manufacturers of the very products that promise women they’ll feel and look younger and better if only they would buy their products. It’s horseshit really.

I mean, I think every guy looks at pictures of hot, young women in magazines, but it isn’t because they’re better looking than you… it’s because we’ve been trained from an early age to be attracted by women in magazines! Mostly from our experimentation of masturbating to pictures of hot, young women in magazines.

Anyway, I bring this up because today some woman at some spa called to inform me that my girlfriend’s order of some sort of unguent arrived special order. My girlfriend’s bathroom already looks like a mortician’s lab with all the various potions, lotions, and sprays… the only thing that’s missing is an embalming table. Luckily, the Red Queen doesn’t use many cosmetic products, but I wonder what would happen if she stopped using the products she does use… Which is a thought process that probably started the horror movie genre.