Sunday, January 10, 2010

Garnier's Law of Mascara Names

You may be familiar with Moore's Law, which dictates that the computing power of a single silicon chip doubles roughly every two years, as the transistors upon it get tinkier and tinier.

You may not be so familiar - mainly because I just made it up - with Garnier's Law. Garnier's Law dictates that the names given to mascara products will double in ridiculousness roughly every two years, despite the lack of any corresponding technical advance in the product itself.

Like Moore's Law, Garnier's Law has been in force for some years, such that we now find ourselves in a world where the names given to mascara have become entirely decoupled from reality.

Hence Lash Builder, a plausible name for a mascara, given that the sole function of the product is and always has been to cake your eyelashes in a manner that makes them look slightly thicker and longer, gave way in due course to Lash Architect, a ridiculous proposition when you think about it, since architects don't actually build anything but rather swank about in wenge-wood-and-opaque-glass offices wearing expensive glasses and reading back copies of Monocle magazine. A mascara does none of those things.

Rejected names for Lash Architect: Lash Brickie, Lash Structural Engineer, Lash Planning Officer.

But that was then. Today Garnier's Law has seen to it that we have entered the realm of the truly fantastical when it comes to mascara names. Only last night I was alerted to the existence of a mascara named Telescopic Explosion, which sounds more like an industrial accident than a cosmetic; the kind of thing that you might read under 'exemptions' in the small print of Sir Patrick Moore's contents insurance policy.

Rejected names for Telescopic Explosion: Optical Disaster, Lenticular Catastrophe, Oops I Dropped The Refracting Mirror.

I hardly dare let my mind dwell upon what kind of product names the future may hold in store for that same coloured goo that people have been caking on to their eyelashes for centuries. Perhaps we can look forward to sallying forth to Boots in 2019 to purchase a tube of Lashmageddon, or Thermo-Nuclear Lash Eruptor. I don't think Total Protonic Reversal strays too far from the bounds of the possible, nor Infernal Trajectory, nor Eyeschaton.

We may long for the innocent, simple days of Lash Builder when we're staring down the claggy barrel of a tube of Supermassive Interplanetary Collision Course, but in vain. Garnier's Law, like Moore's Law, is unstoppable. Don't say I didn't warn you.