(Provide a British accent when you read this headline, please.)
There’s a very unintentionally funny and suspicious Internet ad I keep seeing on Yahoo!-related web pages for/from something called “Stages of Beauty”, and it has a picture of a middle-aged-looking woman rubbing some red, viscous liquid all over her face that looks a lot like blood. Then the headline, right next to this picture, says: “A shocking trick gets rid of wrinkles fast. Try this one weird solution and look years younger!” Um, if it looks like blood, and they’re calling it “shocking” right there in the headline, then doesn’t that make it seem like this woman is rubbing the blood of a freshly murdered victim all over her face? And this isn’t something I think they want us to think, now is it?
We all know about this “beauty treatment” for an age-defying effect from history and from horror movies, right? A woman from medieval Europe called “The Bloody Countess” was infamous for doing this very thing to preserve her youthful appearance! Her name was Elizabeth Bathory, she was a Hungarian countess, and she supposedly murdered hundreds of young women so that she could allegedly bathe in the blood of virgins to maintain her youthful visage. I seriously doubt this would work very well in real life, although admittedly I have not tried it. And if it depends upon the blood of virgins to work properly, I shouldn’t think it would be practical to try this course of treatment in America. But are they really intending to appear like they are encouraging people to engage in this type of gory activity? I wouldn’t have thought so, but…
I think especially for Internet advertising, numbers of eyeballs are very important. That’s why those stupid, insufferably annoying ads dance and flash all around, making it a miserable experience to try to read stuff online nowadays. This ad mercifully does not engage in that crime against humanity, thanks be to God, but it seems to encourage a different one. But I think this is merely to pique our curiosity sufficiently to cause us to click on the ad and see what exactly they are suggesting. I’m not interested enough to try it, but I have to wonder if they are indeed intending for us to think this woman is washing her face in the blood of the innocent, or if they’re just making some dubious health & beauty claim. Maybe it’s just pomegranate juice or something. And while I couldn’t care less about whatever they’re selling, that part I must admit I am slightly curious about.
Now, I’m sorry to say that I don’t know how to direct traffic to a specific web advertisement, but if you surf around the Yahoo! news links, you will probably encounter this silly and “shocking” ad at some point. But here is that Wikipedia page on Elizabeth Bathory, in the off-chance you’re not familiar with her and her misdeeds:
