Quote:
Originally posted by jennofay
im curious, maggie, have you ever used, or even looked at their products, or are you just making a generalization of what you suspect the clients of this particular company must look like?
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Oh, I *have* looked at their products...back when "goth" was hipper than it has been lately. At the time they struck me as pretty grim and gruesome.
A visit to their website this evening (I hate Flash navigation) shows they've had to branch out a bit since then; the line of nail enamels now goes a bit beyond "Gash", "Pallor", "Uzi" and "Asphxyia", probably because styles *have* changed. But even before then, "Roach", "Smog", "Rust", "Oil Slick" and "Acid Rain" just weren't what I looked for in cosmetics...and reminded me of nothing so much as the paints sold to railroad modellers: not only "rust", but "grime" and "mud" and "aged concrete".
The corporate history on the website notes they "reinvented" themselves in May 1999, trying to tone down the gritty image they'd worked so hard to build. Nine months later they were "adopted" (I suspect that means bought out) by a French conglomerate.
Interestingly enough, the item featured on the top of their site this evening is a "honey body dust" that I recognize from the 1970s., when it was sold under the "Kama Sutra" brand to well-off hippies. They've added sparkles, and the puff is now a "vampy leopard" fake fur rather than satin, but it's recognizably the same product.
I guess what goes around comes around.
As for my image of who would use their stuff, I *know* who would use it: My 14-year old daughter would die for it. And the list of "celebrity users" starts with the Dixie Chicks and ends with Dennis Rodman. :-)
Now *that's* individualism....a word I emphasized becuase it seemed to me to be so heavily ironic in-context, (*not* as a personal attack.or anything like that). Goth as a style seemed to me to lose its cache of individualism precicely *because* it became so popular. My life has led me to plenty of genuine expression of my individualism; and the goal of the ad campaign that started this thread is to get as many people as possible to express their individualism in *exactly* the same way: by buying this company's makeup.
The Dixie Chicks *are* pretty hot, though. :-)