I’m tired of reading about it and saying nothing…

I’m tired of reading this and saying nothing.Sometimes you just have to speak out…

Every morning the first thing I read, by virtue of where it sits, is the back of the St. Ives Apricot Scrub bottle. According to the bottle, they make this stuff with “swiss glacier water” which is “nature’s pure form of moisture.”

Ahem. No, it’s NOT.

Nature’s pure form of moisture, for any acceptable definition of the word “moisture” and the word “pure” is DEW. It’s as close as nature can get to providing us with distilled water.

Glacier water, on the other hand, is a mess. I just read about the problems they’re having with infectious human waste on the glaciers of some of the worlds most travelled summits. Drinking from a glacier is a sure-fire way to get you some high-altitude Hershey-squirts. Maybe swiss glaciers are cleaner, but that just means that they’re “nature’s less-infected form of dirty snow-melt.”

If any of you reading this work for St. Ives, would you PLEASE send a memo to your marketing team and tell them to pull their heads out?

–Howard

38 thoughts on “I’m tired of reading about it and saying nothing…”

  1. Forget it! I’ve done studies in marketing and brought up similar points of incorrectness and everyone looked at me like I was smoking crack.

    And frankly if the notion of correctness in advertising can’t even sink in at university then it hasn’t a hope in the corporate world.

  2. You can’t blame the marketing department for the general population’s lack of knowledge. People think glacial water is good, so we say ‘glacial water’ on our products and sales go up. You know this, Howard. Asking companies to hurt sales in order to ‘educate’ is something that never works. There’s a reason why there have to be advertising laws around. Because marketing people will tell you anything they think you want to hear in order to sell a product. “Cheerios is good for your heart! And cures baldness! And gives you rock hard erections for hours on end!” If people were better informed, marketing would have less effect, and could get away with much fewer stupid appeals to the masses.

    1. Priaprism-Os! For health, regularity, and painfully extended erections that leave your genitals cramped and dysfunctional! Now half off with a coupon at participating stores. See your local advertising magazine for details.

  3. Gotta admit, though, these things make shopping bearable. 🙂 For me. Perhaps less so for , who has to put up with similar rants from me, while in the store.

    1. I love store ranting.

      “Do they really need more varieties of snack foods? I mean, they already have dozens of flavours of crisps, and each one of those is ruffled, or baked, or fried, or super-flavoured, or made-for-dipping, or handy-snack-size, or Atkins-approved, or—“

  4. I think they should collect dew and sell that.

    I imagine thousands upon thousands of acres of pristine grasslands, and every morning BZZZZZZZZZ dozens of fanlike harvesters fly over the grass, harvesting the whole thing in a matter of minutes, then pumping them to the main station for drinking purposes. Mmmm!

      1. I didn’t think of that! The water company could operate mini dew-collecters on hundreds of thousands of lawns around the plant, thus maximizing output through distributed work! All that would be required is agreement with the homeowners, which should be easy if the devices are custom-installed and provide automatic lawn-grooming services while they harvest! You’re a genius!

        1. They are planning on doing something similar similar to dew around the world. Collecting the sweat off cold water pipes. Same kind of process, less grassy taste!

  5. The BS spewed by marketroids is, sadly, endless. What’s worse, they continue to get away with it because most of their customers are sufficiently naive or ill-informed that they believe it.

    1. Why not? Other than the fact it tastes like ass.

      I like my nice, dirty spring water. Tasty and chewy. Sorta’ like that stuff they used to advertise on SNL, back in the ’70’s: Lake Erie Water.

      1. Because deionized water has few to no impurities, it goes looking to dissolve some. Like from the inside of your intestines. It’s really not good for you.

        1. Ooh, never thought of that. Water is pretty corrosive, so leaving it ’empty’ would not be a good idea. And all those people out drinking Dasani (or whatever Coke calls it). I think that stuff’s distilled.

          Oh, here’s Swill, the only water that’s dredged from Lake Erie.

          1. No, Dasani (and its Pepsi competitor, Aquafina) is reverse-osmosis processed to get rid of some of the nastier-tasting traces from the municipal water supply nearest the bottling plant. The FDA wouldn’t let them get away with selling distilled water to be drunk.

            Mmm, chewy water.

          2. Hmmm…I brew my own beer and have seen where some have called for using distilled water. I’ve always used local spring water (Florida limestone based), as I felt I didn’t need to add any extra minerals or ‘water salts’ to the mash. With all the complex chemestry going on in brewing, I think using distilled water would just be opening the door for more trouble. Guess distilled is just good for the radiator.

          3. Actually, if you’re cooking or brewing, distilled water is FINE. The water will end up plenty impure to not give your gut any trouble.

            Drinking distilled water with meals is ALSO fine — your gut is a churning mess of chemicals at those times, and the worst you’ll do is lose some of the nutrition from the meal to the water.

            Drinking distilled water when you’re dehydrated and thirsty, and doing so on an empty stomach… now THAT’s a bad idea.

            –Howard

          4. Actually, depending what else is there, those may not be enough to keep the leeching from happening. Dad used to work at a rocket fuel lab when he was in the Air Force and they would put distilled water in the coffee for a prank. The impurities from coffee was not enough to keep the drinkers from getting diarrhea.

            True distilled water (laboratory grade) will cause problems even if you are drinking it while eating something with it. However, most store products that say they are distilled aren’t really pure distilled water. It just means that somewhere in the purification process it was distilled. Usually after the distillation the water goes through an activated carbon filter, aeriation and a few other things to improve the taste.

            (I had a long debate about this with a beer brewing hobbyist. If you want, I can see if I can find the URLs to the commerical water purifying processes and the one about laboratory grade distilled water again.)

          5. Perhaps they weren’t washing the coffeepot well enough. My parents distill all their drinking water, and while I’ve drunk their water many times while visiting, I’ve never had any problems, nor has anyone else, that I know of. This is both with meals and at other times, including when thirsty.

            Personally, I don’t like the taste as much as normal tap water, and wouldn’t bother distilling water, but it isn’t as if it’s actually bad for you.

          6. Well, reresearching the topic, it’s possible that what Dad’s buddies used was a few steps beyond normal distilled water. I don’t know if they did the ultrapure stuff back then or not.

          7. http://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/jul99/931496543.Ch.r.html
            Long ago, we had a commercial ultrapurification apparatus
            that took distilled water and removed bacteria with a special filter, ions
            with a resin, and other impurities with activated carbon. The manual that
            came with the apparatus said (approximately), “The best thing we can tell
            you about storage of ultrapure water is — don’t!” As you supposed,
            ultrapure water in contact with perfectly clean glass will manage to
            dissolve substances from the glass surface. The stored water is generally
            still purer than what comes out of our present treatment system, but not
            nearly as pure as it was when it emerged from the ultrapurification
            apparatus.

          8. Speaking of Dasani, I just saw a commercial with Bears in it talking about how “mountain streams” were full of salmon spawning and how Dasani was 100% salmon free. Someone’s getting the idea, eh?

  6. Howard I had this vision of you, sweating under a mountain of critical work, and felt really really bad about taking your time away for something as trivial as the Comixpedia article I am writing.

    My conscience is now eased. 😀

    The science-y jokes come so naturally to you. I’m jealous of that. When I want to do a joke about Newtonian mechanics or something, it takes me hours of extremely slophazard internet research. And on chemistry, I’m hopeless.

    I agree with the above posters who said product people are poor science educators, but you can’t expect them to be. The ones you should be going after are the innumerate journalism grads who do science reporting in this country. They think if they get through the broadcast without mispronouncing anything, they must have done their job. Comprehension is not even an option.

  7. Exerpt from an article on enhydros geodes: “The water in the fluid inclusion is commonly the water that was trapped when the crystal grew. Some scientists have examples of fluid inclusion dating the early Precambrian.” http://www.gamineral.org/enhydros.html

    Me: “Wow you too can now drink the water from ancient times. Just look what it did for the dinosaurs.”

    Ummm wait a minute…

  8. Really Bad Marketing Strategies

    Not only did Coke have a bad time in London because their “pure water” was just taken straight from the local municipal system, which had the purest, safest water in the world, but then they ran reverse osmosis on it and caused an overabundance of bromate, which causes cancer…
    full story here:
    http://tinyurl.com/2mu7h
    gotta love bottled water…

    1. Re: Really Bad Marketing Strategies

      Eh, it looks like they actually added Bromide then oxidized it into bromate accidentally. The Bromide was added intentionally and is harmless. The oxidizing is separate from their reverse osmosis treatment. The article could be wrong though.

  9. Everytime I see that stupid shampoo commercial that croons “Your hair is a living thing…” I want to scream “NO! Hair is DEAD TISSUE! You cannot FEED IT!”

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