Brief one this: So I’m watching Contact on television and there’s an advert for Pantene shampoo. And the voice comes on – the deep pounding “buy me” voice of the professional voice-over artist – and he says ,”Pantene makes your hair not just once – but twice as shiny!” Can you imagine that? Can you imagine how awesome that must be? I mean something that makes your hair once as shiny is clearly pretty good (given how important the advert made it sound), but this is way way beyond once! This is like twice! That’s like once as shiny two times over!
Can someone explain to me how an advert can present “once as shiny” as somehow something pretty awesome that only Pantene can beat? I mean, wouldn’t hair naturally be once as shiny? If it wasn’t – that would be a problem, wouldn’ t it? I mean if your shampoo made your hair 90% as shiny, then wouldn’t it gradually and eventually decrease in shininess every time you washed it? Wouldn’t it eventually come to absorb all light? Maybe that does happen in very poor places where they can’t afford proper almost-once-as-shiny-making shampoo. God how confusing that must be for people at night. It would hurt your eyes eventually, wouldn’t it? And wouldn’t it make people’s heads really really hot after a while? Frankly the thought’s so scary that I’m now scrabbling around for a shampoo that guarantees me precisely 100% normal shininess and not a single millionth of a percentage either way. If it’s not precisely once as shiny, I don’t think I want to go near it…