Men's Moisturizing Cream

I seem to have a bit of a fixation on advertizing today; this is my third HPANWO Voice article on the subject in two days! This poster was on a railway station platform promoting Bulldog men’s moisturizer. Of course moisturizers have been manufactured and advertized since time immemorial, but in the past these products were always aimed at women. For this reason you’ll see them contained in very feminine-looking bottles with feminine-themed marketing and advertizing. But not anymore! Maybe because of David Beckham and similar fashion icons it’s recently become quite trendy for men to look “Metro-sexual”: well-groomed, smartly-dressed and youthful with a smooth unblemished complexion; hence these new moisturizers.

But how new are they? I went into a chemists shop to check and actually the list of ingredients is almost the same for both the male and female moisturizers. They’re both the same stuff! What we are looking at here is very crafty rebranding that has used the sinister and morally dubious psychological tricks developed by Edward L Bernays, see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyPzGUsYyKM (Especially the first episode from about 5.50)

There is nothing illegal about this practice at all, and I think few people would feel offended or under attack by such mind-games, but I do. Mental sovereignty should be something held sacred by society, but instead it’s wantonly, contemptuously and thoughtlessly exploited every day as a normal part of business.