I remember recently trying to explain to my sister about how there’s some guy who has a business making diamonds out of people’s hair, and how he was raving about making diamonds out of Michael Jackson’s hair right around the time that he died. So in trying to express his exuberance for the project, he has the nerve to say this: “The question isn’t ‘should we make diamonds out of Michael Jackson’s hair’, but ‘don’t we owe it to the world to make diamonds out of Michael Jackson’s hair?’!” So obviously this guy went to business school for snake oil salesmanship and got an MBA in infomercial huckstering.
So I don’t really know why this thing stuck out in my mind, except for the fact that it’s so ridiculously stupid, but the whole idea still strikes me as really hilarious. I mean, for one thing, how do we even know whose hair each diamond was really made out of, assuming it’s really even possible to do it in the first place. Are we just supposed to take his word for it? I mean, would anyone really take the word of a guy who can say, with a straight face, this sentence: “Don’t we owe it to the world to make diamonds out of Michael Jackson’s hair?” This guy could be lying all the time, and we’d never know it! Seriously, if you can say that stuff and act like you mean it, what fraud or scam are you not capable of?
But let’s forget for the moment how full of crap this guy is and act like it’s an awesome idea to make diamonds out of Michael Jackson’s hair, Okay? I know it’s hard, but it’s only for a few minutes. How would you go about doing something as ingeniously brilliantly marvelous as making diamonds out of someone’s hair? He explained it, and it kinda made sense, but when I explained it to my sister, something really funny struck both of us.
How you make diamonds out of someone else’s hair is that you first burn it, and then you compress the burnt ashes remaining with whatever filler they use until it crystallizes into a diamond. You know, like Superman would do. But imagine if you will, a business set up in a factory to do this: they’d be burning hair all day long indoors! Can you imagine what that would smell like? Eek! All I have to do is think of what that aroma would be to ask this question: “Don’t we owe it to the world to not let him do it?”
Now, I think we can agree that this is a pretty intellectually-challenged idea, but there is a particular reason that this idea is a singularly bad way to try to profit off of Michael Jackson’s memory. Can you think of what it might be? I’ll give you a hint: it has something to do with burning hair. That’s right: Michael Jackson’s life took an irreparable turn for the worse when he got his hair burned in a tragic accident in an ad for Pepsi (another company trying to profit off of Michael Jackson). So trying to profit off of his memory by burning his hair seems like it’s in bad taste to me. Surely I’m not the only one to notice this problem, right?
