Mercolized Wax Cream - Dainty up, for crying out loud.

I've never heard of Mercolized Wax Cream before, but then I’m not a woman of 1941 looking to “lighten up a dull, drab, sun-tanned complexion”. Yep. You read right. Having a sun tan was undesirable in 1941. Also, being dainty was the shit.

Fashion changes, and everybody knows that – unless you’re a nineteen year girl and lack the perspective to understand it. My niece enjoys laughing at old pictures of her father with swoopy hair and flared trousers. She is, of course, oblivious to the irony that the current set of fashion fads like muffin top jeans, and droopy “I just shat in my pants” jeans will be viewed by history in the same light as leprosy. Even a person as dumb as a teenager should be expected to understand that all things change, especially retarded clothing trends.

Actually, the goofier a fad is, the better the manufacturers like it, because when it goes out of style, nobody wants to be seen wearing it, which sends all the sneetches to the store for whatever is new and hot, or soon to be hilarious and stupid. The unfaltering historical constant is that every new generation thinks all that came before them is lame and that only they have the vision to be the supreme arbiters of cool forever and ever. Hah. Just take lots of pictures and hang on to them for ten years. Then, you can use the pictures for purposes of extortion. It's no less than they deserve.

I think you've had enough apples, love.

Fads always seem to follow the pattern of “whatever is hardest to have”. In this ad, the implication is that a sun tan is bad, presumably because it means you have a menial job and spend a lot of time outdoors. Here in the era of the couch potato, getting outside and forcing some air into your lungs is a desirable thing, and so is the accompanying sun tan, warnings against excessive UV exposure notwithstanding.

Here’s another example. You know how all the women in old paintings are kind of tubby? Same thing. Hundreds of years ago, anybody who didn’t spend their day sowing, reaping, bailing, or hoeing was probably pretty rich. And so, it became a status symbol to have a few inches of blubber around you to prove that you didn’t have to break your back for a living. Women that we now regard as “lean and healthy” would, in the time of Peter Paul Reubens, be called “malnourished”. Now that crappy food of all kinds are readily available and frighteningly cheap, the luxury of fatness has lost its glow.

I could go out on a limb and call the bluetooth earpiece a status symbol. It implies that you are popular, or at least in demand, and that you are tech-savvy. These are, of course, mistaken. If you use one of those, you MAY be busy or popular, but you could just as easily wear it to make yourself look popular or important. You're probably just a douchebag if you walk around a store wearing it. Upgrade your status to "asshole" if you walk around the store actually carrying on a phone conversation using it.

I do like the product names in this ad. They don't tell you anything about what the products do. You can carry a jar of Phelactine to the checkout aisle without embarrassment. It's not like "Ex-Lax", which has part of the word "laxative" right in the name. I'd like all of the more embarrassing products to have cryptic names. As I get older, I expect to need more of these items down the road, and it'd be nice to be able to buy a bottle of Transitol instead of "Core Dump - The high-tech laxative!"