In my high school teaching days, a student familiar with my affinity for the Kool Aid Man purchased me a three-pack of Kool Aid Lip Smackers Lip Balm. That’s right: three whole tubes of lip gloss endorsed by a jug of sugar water.
The product is terrible... absolutely terrible. Really, I’m smearing a crudely refined waste oil product on my lips, albeit with a fruit flavour.
And this crap never absorbs. It just moves on: Mostly leaving oily, fruit-flavoured deposits on glasses and stem ware - along with occasional sightings on cutlery, pens, leather sofas, and a surprising number of other household items - as this product inches through its first half-life.
I should interject that “fruit-flavoured” is a bit of a misnomer. The flavours are less fruit and more adjective: Bodacious Bling-Berry. Ripe-Rockin’ Raspberry. Union Carbide Chokecherry. It’s the adjective, not the fruit, driving the flavour.
Regardless, it was a thoughtful gift and I have long felt an obligation - perhaps even a professional responsibility - to continue using it. But at the same time I have some serious reservations about using health and beauty products endorsed by a personified non-carbonated soft drink. Especially products that, if the Kool-Aid man was to use them himself, would lead to nothing but oily smears across his face. For god’s sake - the Kool Aid Man doesn’t even have lips. What gives him the right to endorse a lip gloss?
So I’ve reached the end. Suggestions for a new lip balm would be most appreciated... products endorsed by celebrities, personified kitchen containers and/or utensils, or any other inanimate object or passed-on celebrity given life by marketing thaumaturges or necromancers need not apply.
