I don't see a lot of advertising, so I hope you will overlook that my astonishment is about seven months late. I was 15 seconds into a spot that I assumed was a new snake oil mascara when I heard "Latisse is the first and only FDA-approved treatment for inadequate or not enough lashes."
WTF? "Inadequate or not enough lashes?" Just because you name something "Eyelash hypotrichosis," that doesn't make it a medical condition (with all due respect for the--I'm guessing twelve--people in this country suffering from debilitating eyelash hypotrichosis). Turns out that Latisse was originally a glaucoma drug. Some enterprising person in R&D noticed that people taking the glaucoma eyedrops had lashes to die for. Thus, they figured out a way to deliver the drug directly to the lash folicles and went through the entire FDA approval system (which pharmaceutical companies happily remind us is fraking expensive when we ask why miracle eyelash-growing drugs cost $120 a month) so they could directly market the same drug, in lower concentrations with the promise of looking like Brooke Shields. I kid you not, Brooke Shields is the posterperson for a drug now.
There are a whole lot of things wrong with health care in America, and this may be an odd place for me to draw the outrage line. Seriously though, we rank 30th--dead last among developed nations--in the percentage of infants who make it to their first birthday. People are dying of actual diseases, and companies are putting their resources into curing "inadequate or not enough eyelashes." I really don't care that 90% of the drug's development was for glaucoma, which is, unlike inadequate eyelashes, something that harms people. The company still devoted resources to testing and getting approval of the drug as an eyelash growth serum.
Incidentally, the logo for the company that makes/markets Latisse, Allergan, looks an awful lot like the logo for Veridian Dynamics. That alone ought to tell you something (other than that, if you actually had to click the link for Veridian Dynamics, you really need to start watching Better off Ted).
2 comments:
Always thought it funny, people don't care about important things until it affects them. There are too many people that are reactive to problems rather than being proactive. This is one example. Don't care until it happens to them. Then suddenly, "we have to combat the problem!" --Emp. Peng.
Janet, when I saw that ad I thought the same thing! Ah, well, free enterprise! May be it will react badly with Botox (R), and cause eyelashes to be grown on the lips!
PS gald to hear from another TedHead!
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