I came very close to spending $50 today on a product that is ridiculous on its face.<\/p>\n
Or ridiculous on anyone’s face.<\/p>\n
I don’t have a lot of spare cash right now. And yet I got suckered into watching an infomercial for face lift cream.<\/p>\n
The hook? An ad that said, “Tighten and lift a saggy neck (do this before bed).”<\/p>\n
The cream is\u00a0sold by a company called “Beverly Hills MD.” The name alone should have told me all I needed to know.<\/p>\n
But first I clicked on the ad because I thought I might learn something from the video. Like maybe an easy jaw exercise to firm your neck muscles, for example.<\/p>\n
Us cheapskates who want things for free get what we deserve.<\/p>\n
The video is long, uses the same script that all marketing videos follow. One of the rules is to tell a really long story that makes the seller seem like a good guy instead of a conniving schmuck.<\/p>\n
The story must NOT mention that a product is being sold, but rather convince you that you are going to be inducted into a secret society where you will learn how it is possible to get rid of your saggy neck.<\/p>\n
Anyone who has been drawn into these commercial videos more than once would\u00a0realize quickly that there will be a product, not a free exercise. Still I watched because I thought there might be some new technological breakthrough.<\/p>\n
Technology to reverse aging, get rid of your saggy neck without surgery. Right.<\/p>\n
The technological breakthrough is that Facebook has gotten better at predicting what kind of product I, a 56-year-old woman, can be talked\u00a0into buying.<\/p>\n
As the HighYa review<\/a>\u00a0notes in its understated way,<\/p>\n Beverly Hills MD\u2019s anti-aging products include a lot of proprietary, third-party ingredients that sound really cool and are made to appear effective, although verifiable clinical trials for these products appear to be scarce.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The special Internet-only price for this cream was $49.95, which is in fact half of what this cream sells for on Amazon.<\/p>\n I went to Amazon not to compare prices, but to read the reviews. They were very negative<\/a>.<\/p>\n And I also read a page\u00a0on a site called RealSelf, which reviews and gives doctors’ critiques of various body improvement treatments. The page was titled, “Do Face Lift Creams Really Work?” <\/a><\/p>\n The answer from doctors was a resounding No.<\/p>\n Thank God for reviews. It’s like having a really smart older sister sitting next to you while you’re watching TV.<\/p>\n Today’s penny is a 2014, which is apparently the year that Beverly Hills MD went into business.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I came very close to spending $50 today on a product that is ridiculous on its face. Or ridiculous on anyone’s face. I don’t have a lot of spare cash right now. And yet I got suckered into watching an infomercial for face lift cream. The hook? An ad that said, “Tighten and lift a … read more Don’t be stupid<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":7653,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[318],"tags":[36,82,904,902,900,343,903,901,899],"class_list":["post-7652","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-refraction","tag-36","tag-beauty","tag-consumer","tag-cream","tag-face","tag-neck","tag-reviews","tag-skin","tag-vanity"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7652","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7652"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7652\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7655,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7652\/revisions\/7655"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/7653"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7652"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7652"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7652"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}