How old does this girl from the ads look to you? I’d go with hardly legal.
I was thinking to myself the other day (I occasionally do have actual thoughts, you know) that we don’t do enough for our young girls. I mean, yes, we rear them on a steady stream of unusually thin actresses, musicians, and models, with hardly any size diversity in evidence (and the thin-only aesthetic seems extra pronounced in shows targeted at teenagers). At the same time, we make sodas and chips and candy available in their school vending machines (with the schools taking a cut, arguably because education is insufficiently funded by us) and we slash P.E. programs as a way of cutting back expenses. Plus there’s the way we adults sometimes talk about our own bodies, disparaging our thighs while gnawing on a lettuce leaf. Some of us even criticize our daughters for their weight, and many of their peers will do it too. So yeah, we do a pretty good job of setting them up with distorted body expectations and few tools for pursuing a healthy lifestyle.
But is it enough? Sure, eight-year-olds go on diets, and our young women develop eating disorders, or at a minimum engage in disordered eating, patterns which often dog them for their entire lives. Yet couldn’t we do more? Can’t we start actually marketing ineffective and fraudulent diet products directly to them, so they can really start the cycle of desperation minus information early on? Don’t we need to do more to make sure they desperately swallow one bottle of snake oil after another in a futile search for the magic cure for their imperfect, loathed bodies? Shouldn’t we be teaching them to fall for one quick and often unhealthy fix after another as early as possible, instead of occasionally trying to promote informed food choices, daily physical activity, and realistic body acceptance?
Oh but wait: Thank you Pink Patch! Because not only are you a total crap product, but you also market directly to young girls and women!
The Pink Patch, in case you missed it, borrows the idea from things like nicotine patches used for quitting smoking, but minus the actual effectiveness. It purportedly has some seaweed blah blah metabolism enhancing hoosie whatsit in it, and a bunch of other ingredients. Of course the amount of each ingredient is a proprietary secret, so it’s kinda hard to evaluate. But hey, does it work? Let’s see: It’s unregulated by the FDA, it has no clinical trials supporting it, and it has not been sufficiently reviewed by independent consumer groups. The FTC has filed suit against similar weight loss patch products, and there may have even been consumer complaints about it. But hey, they have positive reviews on their website (which I won’t link to, sorry) and I’m sure you can totally trust those. Like this one:
“I spent most of high school being teased for my weight. The popular girls seemed to have everything: the gorgeous bodies, the cutest boys. I was not going to feel that way in college too! The summer before I left, I tried the Pink Patch. I lost 15 lbs! It changed my life completely. Now I’m in my sophomore year and I’M the popular girl. Thank you Pink Patch!”
Wow. The pink patch won’t just make you thinner—you get popularity and happiness too. It changes your life. No exploitative advertising there, of course. No selling sad dreams to the lonely teenagers, the insecure girls who feel ugly and are told they are ugly and assume they have only themselves to blame, themselves and their flawed, imperfectly-sized bodies. It’s not like adolescence is a vulnerable time and all… Why this is just spot-on for our girls. Excuse me, I have to go hit something for a minute…
Back again, and I’ve regained my composure I think. Now, any lack of evidence supporting the effectiveness of the patch shouldn’t stop the manufacturers from advertising on Facebook and other youth-trafficked sites of course, using pictures of very young women. They gotta target those young girls, because how else are you going to get rich on the backs of our anxious daughters? In fact, they’ll keep sending you pink patches if you don’t cancel your subscription, so they have a built-in way to make money off kids who fail to read the fine print or who aren’t perhaps especially savvy consumers (you know, the kind who might fall for a diet scam in the first place.) And it’s so cute, the pink patch, the little rosy crap sticker that magically melts that offending weight away. Hey girls, soon all your friends will be using it! Course they say you have to be 18 to use it, and on the internet, no way some young girl is gonna get her hands on a product while underage, especially when the models in the advertisements look more like 15. Cough.
Maybe when my daughter gets a little older, she’ll be taken by something like this. That thought doesn’t make my blood run cold AT ALL. Grrrrr.
So congratulations, Pink Patch makers. In an age where offensive and ridiculous diet charlatanism is endemic, you actually managed to truly disgust me. I guess if I had one wish for you, it’d that those of you who are profiteering from this scam could somehow be completely covered from head to toe in patches, and then have them ripped off your bodies slowly, one by one. And then you’d have to sit in a room with 500 young girls and explain to them that you exploited their fears and desires to make plies of cash for yourselves. And I hope they beat the crap out of you. They’ll have to race me for it.
P.S. For an antidote to the crap and the quackery, go here please. Now.
That girl in the picture probably weighs less than a hundred pounds! Why does she need a patch? And does the whole patch concept remind anyone else of birth control?
I can’t imagine what crap will be out there by the time my daughter starts to worry about this stuff, which at this rate will be when she’s 5.
heather
October 23rd, 2008
Is it naive that a big reason I want to teach nutrition is so that people will be less stupid about products like these.
And I’ve seen 12 year olds that look around that girl’s age.
Tricia
October 23rd, 2008
Thank you for your article. About that girl in the photo - she probably had to twist her torso really badly to get that. The arm and angle are all there for a reason. And, of course, let’s not forget Photoshop.
Also, am I the only one who feels disturbed at how she seems to have had one leg erased entirely?
krysjez
October 24th, 2008
I’d say this is why it’s so important for parents to keep an eye on their kids internet usage. And keep an eye on their kids in general.
But more importantly, teach your kids good health habits and be frank with them about the facts.
CJ
October 24th, 2008
Fantastic article. I just came back from a trip to India and was shocked to see how much it has changed since I last visited. The body image/self-affirmation values of the West are slowly trickling into the Eastern culture. It saddens me to think a culture so free from these negative-isms is slowly becoming tangled in this destructive behavior.
It sickens me to think about the way our society is headed with this kind of stuff out there within reach of our children.
RG
November 1st, 2008
Hi, I just found your article trying to get some ideas of what this pink patch is all about…I am French and saw it being advertized on a French website tonight, yeah it sounds like a cute brilliant idea when you first look at the advert..but wait a minute, why indeed targetting young girls mostly and why can’t we have the list of “ingredients” and finally why can not the FDA regulate all these money-wasting products.. anyway will show your article to my 16 year-old daughter so she can write an article in her high school newsletter as an editor. Well done for your article, sense of humour and intelligence. Why is it always too good to be true!! but people fall for it.
Anne-Marie
May 7th, 2009
I have been using the patch for 3 days - it isnt a horrendous way of targeting young girls, it is a patch which has helped me to eat simply whilst taking away some cravings in between meals - No i dont want to look like victoria beckham I want something that will help me along my way to losing a few pounds, these comments are all based on peoples lack of knowledge of the product, perhaps you should all be commited to trying something prior to commenting or accepting that maybe we dont all want to be happy with what we have and want to lose weight for whatever reason. I like to debate the issues I am well informed on as does anyone but it would appear I am the only person here that can give first hand information in that it works!
lisa marie
May 22nd, 2009