Anyway, the other day I saw this in a drugstore:
Surely not, I thought. Surely no one would ever go there in a thousand years, I thought. I had underestimated the cosmetics industry. They have not only gone there, they have purchased land there, and erected an outlet mall with an attached waterslide park there. As the name implies, the product contains placenta (of what creature I know not), which is believed to be good for the skin and "improving your constitution". In fact, a quick googling revealed a horrorcopia of placental skin care and health products. You can get creams, pills and apparently even injections containing "placental extract" to make your skin nice and soft and your constitution more improved. A steal at roughly $90 a box.
4 comments:
Yeah, it may be placenta, but don't worry - it has amino acids too!
On second thoughts, if this is sold in convenience stores, then I'm not surprised as nothing goes rotten long after the sell by date....even placenta.....now there's a thought.....yuk.
Yay for amino acids. They seem to have replaced "negative ions" as the current marketing fad in Japan . Do people even know what they are? I'm constantly reminded of the movie Idiocracy..."but it has electrolytes!" You can get amino acids from eating a nice porkchop...you don't have to go diving into a uterus to retrive a placenta!
I actually ran across this same phenomenon while I was still living in N-town. One of those ads always left for teachers at oni-chu offered a similarly titled skin cream which basically forced me to learn the kanji for placenta. It turned out that this was a set of Kanji which always just jumped out of text when I would see it from then on. At least 3-4 times while I was perusing pharmacy sales pages I noted that products on offer. My favorite was when one of the big pharmacies by the Sendai Train Station, in typical subdued Japanese fashion, was advertising a new product in foot high script. The appropriate Kanji jumped out at me but when I looked at the product's actual name it was (in katakana) "~puren".
Footnote: discovering this 'product' led to one of my favorite awkward Kataoka Sensei moments (of so-so many)... Essentially I asked
if this stuff was really what I thought it was and she said yeah, it's great but don't worry it isn't HUMAN placenta so there is nothing odd about it!
Ah...those awkward Japan moments. "Of course it's placenta. Don't people smear pulverized placenta all over their wrinkles in your country?" On another note, this pharmacological fad is leading to hard-up mammals having offspring just to harvest the placentas and sell them like black market kidneys. This only does them a disservice by enabling their various chemical dependencies while leading to hundreds of neglected, unwanted offspring. Help stop this tragedy by using only placentas that you personally have forcibly removed from clubbed animals.
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