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Anti-Aging Flap
by Joshua Glenn| Boston, USA
Monday, 1 November 2010
tags: americas, brand worlds, clients & brands, contributions from, disciplines, header navigation, making sense
Americans celebrated the spooky-kooky Halloween holiday, yesterday. Thoughts of ghosts and goblins prompted Mark Frauenfelder, founder of the popular group blog Boing Boing to ask the blogosphere), "What the heck is this weird skin flap on Boo Berry?"
See the odd flap of skin (that's what it looks like, anyway) on the side of Boo Berry's mouth, in the illustration from a box of Boo Berry cereal (General Mills), below.
I've got the answer!
Boo Berry, who began haunting us way back in 1973, is getting a bit long (and yellow) in the tooth, these days. Also, as reported on April 1st, 2008, Boo Berry is soon going to be the subject of a biopic starring Christopher Walken. Which means he'll be making a lot of talk-show appearances. Like every other aging celebrity, he wants to recapture his youthful good looks.
So Boo Berry has, it seems obvious to me, begun using Maybelline's new product, the [Age] Eraser ("It's a new age in anti-aging!"). Which, as the advertisement below indicates, apparently works by pulling loose facial skin off to the side, where it's gathered in a drooping, pendulous flap.
I guess the flap then dangles from your face? I'm surprised it isn't surgically removed, but some folks would rather walk around with a pensile flap on their cheek than go under the scalpel. Or perhaps the image of Boo Berry above was taken in between his Eraser treatment and surgery? Either way, it's spooky stuff. Shades [get it?] of Katherine Helmond's endless plastic surgery in Terry Gilliam's Brazil.
Brrrr. Happy Halloween!
NOTE: Cross-posted from HiLobrow.com.
22 November 2010 at 2:49 pm
Josh Glenn says:
Thanks for the comment, TH. My friend Mark Frauenfelder seems to agree with you that Boo Berry’s flap is a medical condition, and he’s performed digital plastic surgery on the ghost:
http://frauenfelder.posterous.com/my-boo-berry-lip-fix
21 November 2010 at 6:58 pm
TH says:
As time goes on, Brazil’s brave new/old world, in which anything/nothing was possible, seems ever more spot-on.
For Boo, a medical differential diagnosis could include: fibroma, adenoma, congenital hemangioma, or other (e.g., http://books.google.com/books?id=i_-wwStynCIC&pg=PA84&lpg=PA84&dq=redundant+buccal+mucosa&source=bl&ots=5pIPnIln_o&sig=czHxk3ERMoVA7miXtGvz6gklEws&hl=en&ei=MVPpTKS8LcPFnAfNxL2xDQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CCYQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=redundant%20buccal%20mucosa&f=false).
I have no idea how this might fit into General Mills’ social agenda, but if Boo has hypospadias, his aberrant cheek could be fortuitous (c.f. http://www.jpurol.com/article/S1477-5131(10)00186-5/abstract). (Anyone know how allogenic ectoplasm grafts fare?)