My Pain Is So Significant

Last night on the way to a friend’s birthday dinner I stopped into CVS to pick up some personal effects. While waiting on the checkout line spied the ‘As Seen on TV” shelf,  the drugstore guilty pleasure.  Ped Egg! Shams Wows! Different tools for opening jars! It’s all there. I’ve literally never purchased anything from the  ’As Seen on TV” shelf, but the dream remains alive.

All the usual suspects were there, plus something called Smooth Away, which appears to be a thing you rub on your legs to get rid of hair instead of shaving them. Why?  It seems like it takes the same amount of effort and lacks the bonus of being able to rinse your legs off. Whatever.  What I do know is that right next to Smooth Away, literally immediately to the right, were several boxes of perfumes developed by various celebrities. I wasn’t surprised to see that already-wealthy female celebrities are hawking perfume that they’ve problem never even smelled before, but I was surprised to see how super-shitty most of the packaging was. 

Really, Mariah Carey’s publicity people? “Lollipop Bling”?

What happened here, team? Did we let the intern name this one? The oddly tan one with the baby voice and the toe ring who always wears a fedora? i think we did. I think we also gave art direction responsibilities to her best gay friend who just finished his first semester of graphic design coursework after coming back from the meth rehab place. Nice.

Moving on we have

Halle Berry sexily emerging from the deep. And why not? However, nothing downgrades an elegant, sexy photo like a price point with ” and 99 cents!” in it.  Halle is an elegant lady, (if a little tacky, let’s be real) who deserves a nice, round number. The font’s the final fucking insult though. It looks like it’s either on the cover of a box of douche or announcing the return of a beloved pole dancer to the main stage at the The Dong Room.

Beyonce Heat.

Where to begin!  The box is red, and red is hot so at least they’re being consistent. Can’t charge anyone in Beyonce’s fragrance factory with inconsistency.  But, why does it come with a lotion? I am of the belief that Beyonce’s perfume probably smells like a combination of: the the inside of your high school principal’s blazer, an overheating Mercedes and a high-end funeral home. A spritz of that will do ya fine, even on the hottest day. No need to go slathering it into your skin cells in lotion form. The bottle also looks like something investigators would find in the medicine cabinet of a trailer where a lot of people were murdered. Right? Right.

On to Faith Hill. For some reason this one makes a lot of sense to me. Of course Faith Hill has a perfume. A “parfum”. Of course she does. She’s a country singer and country singers tend to draw their fan base from Wal-Mart customers holy shit this is the most classist sentence I’ve ever written but I can’t stop now!

Okay. Faith Hill strikes me as someone who’s fan-base lives squarely in largely Christian communities in middle America and guess what they have a lot of in Middle America? Wal-Mart’s. Guess what they don’t have a lot of? Specialty fragrance stores. People buy what they have access to and my guess is that a lot of people in middle America have access to Faith Hill’s parfum, called simply “Faith Hill” which, coincidentally, sounds like a place where a lot of Christian sacrifices might happen. Just sayin’.

Obviously Faith Hill, being Faith Hill, has fans who hail from every corner of this round blue marble, and apparently here in Brooklyn, hence the CVS buyer’s decision.  Now I have a challenge for you gentle readers: If any of you can buy this perfume and confirm for me that it does, in fact, smell like a combination of Estee Lauder Pleasures and one lone gym sock from a Jazzercise class I will show up at your house and make you the omelet of your choice.

Finally, the fragrance of the one known as Shakira.

I cannot help but be enamored of Shakira. Are any of her songs good? No. In fact I only know this one and the one about how she’s a wolf or something. Regardless, I have this affection for her that can neither be named nor denied. During the period of time in which I was really grappling with this, really trying to make sense of it, I remember reading that she and Gabriel Garcia Marquez were like, BFF. That blew me away because what the fuck do they talk about? Lovemaking in meadows smothered with flowers? Does he help to infuse her songwriting with magical realist imagery? Does Shakira write her own songs? I hope so!!

I wonder, too, if GGM helped to advise or at least discuss with Shakira the kinds of elements that should be included in her eponymous fragrance. I bet GGM’s own fragrance would be a special combination of:

• The scent of a pansy dipped in blood
• The smell of a sheet wrapped around a panting, post-coital woman
• The odor of a door of a 900 year old church in a forgotten town, in a forgotten valley
• The salty tang of tears of a widow, collected in a glass for forty years and set on a windowsill in the moonlight on the evening of the vernal equinox.

Fine, but we’re getting off topic. Shakira’s fragrance, which is packaged in the saddest excuse for an atomizer that this world has ever seen, also seems to include some sort of bracelet with it as well. Ew.

Why, Shakira? Is this an attempt to tag all of the she-wolves out there and make them your little army? I still love you. I still think youre so great. Ugh. Your perfume most definitely smells like what the fragrance companies think champagne smells like, PLUS a little bit of what they think “spicy” smells like, PLUS probably vanilla. 

This opus has gotten far off track. Let’s look back at the Review section and think a little bit about that which we have all learned.

• Shakira is best friends with a Nobel Prize Winning Writer
• Mariah Carey definitely does not need the money she’s getting from the sales of this perfume, also stop letting people who wear fedoras to bars decide things.
• Halle Berry is so beautiful but it’s getting boring because she doesn’t ever do anything but marry sex addicts and show up in InStyle
• Faith Hill is probably pretty crazy in bed

G’night!