Comments on: Old cold-cream ad touts beautifying benefits of radioactivity

By: GrumpySteen

GrumpySteen — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 20:19:00 +0000

http://www.cosmeticsandskin.com/companies/dorothy-gray.php

Scroll way way way down to the bottom. Apparently there was a series of buyouts and Dorothy Gray products wound up being available primarily in Argentina and Uraguay.

By: Gyrofrog

Gyrofrog — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 13:52:00 +0000

On a somewhat related note, my parents and some of their peers have described putting their foot in an x-ray machine at the shoe store.

By: Eric

Eric — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 12:50:00 +0000

A friend of mine recently had prostate cancer. I say “had” because he went through radiation treatment and is now considered cured. So please don’t forget there are health benefits to radiation!

By: otterhead

otterhead — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 12:38:00 +0000

I don’t think it’s particularly pedantic to point out that the headline of this video is the complete opposite of what the video actually is :)

By: bill_mcgonigle

bill_mcgonigle — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 05:23:00 +0000

this might be a thing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hormesis

By: voiceinthedistance

voiceinthedistance — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 05:03:00 +0000

The beautifying secret they don’t mention is Marie Curie Skin Rejuvenating Clay Mask.

Dorothy Gray Salon Cold Cream is a fine way to remove the aforementioned beauty product, leaving behind nothing but a healthy glow.

By: Petzl

Petzl — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 04:20:00 +0000

It would appear that they were also trying to dog-whistle this as a “dual-use” product: great for makeup removal, sure, but indispensable for removing radiation after an atomic blast. No doomsday prepper should be without it!

By: wendyjoy

wendyjoy — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 03:50:00 +0000

“The Radium Water worked fined until his jaw came off”

http://scienceofknowing.wordpress.com/2012/11/08/the-radium-water-worked-fine-until-his-jaw-came-off/

By: Preston Sturges

Preston Sturges — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 03:02:00 +0000

MST3K Re: The Incredible Melting Man Quotes Thread

Dr. Loring runs the Geiger counter over the dead nurse:
Ted: “Great”
Mike: “She’s full of crickets”

By: efergus3

efergus3 — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 02:16:00 +0000

You can still get CDV-700 geiger counters on eBay for around $100.

By: GlenBlank

GlenBlank — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 01:55:00 +0000

Oak Ridge Associated Universities (ORAU) has a nice page of photos of a wide variety of radioactive 'health' devices, both historic and present-day, as well as an interesting article about them by Paul Frame of ORAU Caveat lector: If using irradiated dirt as a tracer shocks and astounds you, you'd better brace yourself for these. :-)

By: SamSam

SamSam — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 01:35:00 +0000

Lakelady clearly understood what was going on in the ad — her comment that Cory quoted is spot-on. I guess Cory didn’t really read it, but it’s only funny because he went out of his way to preemptively dismiss the comments.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with someone who posts hundreds of items each week getting confused over the odd one, though.

By: John M. O'Hara

John M. O'Hara — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 00:14:00 +0000

Yes, Cory missed the methodology of the ad entirely. Headline fail.

He’s probably not old enough to remember what a buzzword “fallout” was in the 50s, somewhat like “global warming” today. And people were genuinely afraid of coming home covered in radioactive particulates. A goop that left your face free of Geiger clicks would have appealed to those fears. And every suburbanite was supposed to have a Geiger counter handy in their fallout shelters, right next to the Spam. I’d guess the “Atomic Test Booklet” (!) at the end of the ad describes how to scan your own face. Geiger counters as beauty aids …

By: madopal

madopal — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 00:12:00 +0000

Exactly, here’s the transcription:
“Busy you, in and out of doors every day. Think how much dust and dirt settle on your skin. And make up clings to your skin and clogs pores. That’s why your face needs a thorough cleansing each day. And that’s why cleansing tests were made by an independent testing laboratory. This same kind of dirt was made just radioactive enough to register on a Geiger counter. Leading cleansing creams, complexion soaps, and Dorothy Gray Salon Cold Cream were used to remove this dirt. The Geiger counter proved that Dorothy Gray Salon Cold Cream cleanses up to two and a half times more thoroughly than any soap or other cleansing cream tested.”

So they were just using irradiated dirt, which they probably didn’t actually, do, seeing as how the commercial was probably made by Don Draper. You can almost hear the “ooo, atomic age” pitch.

By: Steve Lombardi

Steve Lombardi — Sun, 10 Mar 2013 23:58:00 +0000

Exactly. But this headline looked better.

By: James S Robbins

James S Robbins — Sun, 10 Mar 2013 23:29:00 +0000

Aren’t they using radioactive dirt as a metric to show how the cold cream removes it? That is, not doing what the headline of the article suggests?

By: Matt

Matt — Sun, 10 Mar 2013 23:15:00 +0000

Purportedly radioactive cosmetics were fairly common in the 1910s-1930s. (In reality, most of them were about as radioactive as dishwater.) As noted above, the 1950s were actually quite radiophobic, for obvious reasons, and this commercial is selling the absence of radioactive schmutz.

But yeah, not that long before, radioactivity was a selling point in and of itself. It connoted vigor, energy, and light, and besides, everyone knew it could do weird and wonderful things to the body. It wasn’t that hard to convince people that just a tiny little pinch of it would give you that, ahem, healthy glow.

I wrote a whole pedantic dissertation on it once!

By: Jonathan Badger

Jonathan Badger — Sun, 10 Mar 2013 23:14:00 +0000

Yeah. There *were* health tonics and such hyping the power of radioactivity in the early 20th century, but they were well before the 1950s.

By: Tejanarusa

Tejanarusa — Sun, 10 Mar 2013 22:37:00 +0000

I remember Dorothy Gray…whatever happened to it, I wonder? But…a pedantic note, you might want to re-watch the commercial. It actually only uses the radioactivity to measure how clean, that is, how much dirt is removed by one product versus another. Not actually hyping radioactivity as a “beautifying” agent. Just that one cleanser removes “all” the dirt, as measured by, I presume, 0 clicks.
suppose it’s too late to write for the details, hmm?