women want what?

So I was watching an episode of Greek (yes, Greek -- I'm home sick with a cold, give me a break. Besides, my college didn't have sororities so I have to live vicariously) today and was confronted with what may have been the most disturbing commercial I've ever seen, for a new prescription drug by the ever so pleasingly pretty name of Latisse.

Before I go further, let me just say that when a friend of mine recently mentioned vibrating mascara I thought she was joking. I mean seriously, vibrating mascara? I can't even handle the stationary kind.

Let me also just relate here a joke, or a story, a much loved story, of mine. An old boyfriend had a roommate, once upon a time, who was very wealthy. This roommate's family owned half of Singapore, or so the story goes, and said boyfriend was quite smitten with this family's wealth. One night the roommate was taken out for dinner by a friend of his who was exponentially more wealthy than he, and this meal was one to go down in the history books. The bottle of wine alone was over $1000. The old boyfriend was telling this story, with a certain gluttonous glee, to my Arielle a few years back and Arielle, never one to mince words, blurted out, "Shit, for $1000 that bottle had better vibrate!"

This became a sort of catch-phrase between us, an acceptable expletive evocative of an uncomfortable mixture of envy and disgust in the face of decadence and waste.

I was shocked to learn of these vibrating mascaras last week, but I was even more shocked today to learn of Latisse which, as it turns out, is a prescription medication that one applies to one's eyelashes in order to make them grow fuller, richer, darker, more luxuriously feminine I suppose. Never mind that you'd best not miss the mark or you'll end up with hair growing out of your eyeballs, or that this allegedly benign drug can turn blue eyes brown, or that during pregnancy "this medication should be used only when clearly needed." ( It's cosmetic, at least if the commercial is to be believed, so when is it ever "clearly needed"?)

Okay I'm done. It's late, and past this girl's bed time. But please just put me out of my misery if I ever get so worked up about appearances (barring some unforeseen calamity such as the need for facial reconstruction from accident or burn or something equally as horrible) as to start using this stuff.

I mean, really. Just think of all the world's troubles these people could solve if they just put their minds to that sort of thing rather than to vibrating mascara and magic-grow eyelash balm.