I’m an infomercial junkie. I’m in love with the Snuggie, I can’t get enough Billy Mays and I’ll always remember that I can “Set it.and forget it!”
But one set of commercials just irks me. It’s the classic infomercial, with good looking celebrities pitching the product with soft elevator music playing in the background. Proactiv acne solution – the silliest commercial on TV.
Everyone has seen the commercials where Jessica Simpson or Jennifer Love Hewitt hock this acne treatment. They claim they “suffered” with acne and only this special treatment could help them. The commercial snaps between shots of them cuddled up on a couch, then to photos of them when they had really bad acne.
Zoom in real close. Over more. Over. Zoom in more. There! Right there! See that one pimple on her chin? Excellent. There’s the acne for you.
As a person who suffered from acne, and I mean real bad acne, these commercials drive me up a wall. One pimple on your chin does not count as acne. That means you just didn’t wash your face well enough the night before or you might just be stressing over a test or something ridiculous like that.
Acne is much worse than a few pimples here and there, like Simpson and Milano claim.
“I used to suffer from a skin problem.and believe me, everybody noticed,” Simpson claims in the advert.
Right. Everyone noticed and we all made fun of you and you went in the corner and cried and never amounted to anything. But what actually happened is that no one saw the one pimple on your chin (likely because it was under a ton of makeup) and you ended up having an illustrious career where you made millions of dollars. What you’ve done since then is a different story entirely (Chicken of the Sea Tuna).
And to think, I actually used that product when I suffered from acne. It worked, a little, but not enough to keep spending the money on it.
Simpson, Hewitt and 17 other “celebrities” are regulars in these commercials that aren’t just limited to 2 a.m. time slots, like most other infomercials. I think that’s another part of the problem for me. They’re just everywhere. Usually the real bad commercials only come out at night for me (Extenze comes to mind), but these Proactiv commercials haunt the daytime hours as well.
My all time “favorite” Proactiv commercial features Lindsay Lohan and her brother. When they show Lohan with “acne,” they actually have to put a large circle on the picture to even make the pimple noticeable.
I know commercials are designed to sell the item, but these just get on my nerves. There’s a difference between selling and lying – and I don’t think they care.
