Pubic Hairstyling Contests: The Worst Marketing Idea Ever
Summertime is here, ladies, and we all know what that means: killer pool parties, driving with the top down, and shaving your "lady lawn" into ridiculous shapes! At least that's the sentiment over at Schick Quattro for Women, a product burdened with the Herculean task of finding new and exciting ways of encouraging women in a public forum to decorate their mons pubis.
And given that they're saddled with job pressures comparable to those of a door-to-door merkin salesman, it's unsurprising to discover that the folks at Schick have completely cracked under the stress. The evidence? The "Prune for June" initiative, a pubic-hair-shaving competition that manages to make no sense whatsoever.
"I'm Don Draper, you're Don Draper, we're all Don Draper!" -the Schick ad team, minutes before they were all fired
Yup, the contest goes like this: To start, any lady over the age of 18 is eligible to choose from one of five "topiary" styles to best reflect her own personality, from "The Bare-Muda Triangle" to a disconcerting lightning shape lifted from Nazi porno movies:
They were going to go with "The Selleck," but he threatened to press charges.
Just in case you're having trouble picking a suitable hairdo for your crotch, they've also gone ahead and paired each pubic cutout with a spunky attitude and style to go along with it. For example, "The Flash" is the rebel of the group ...
"AH-AHHHH! He'll shave every one of us!"
... while "The Heart Breaker" is apparently Zooey Deschanel.
"You're also the worst Planeteer."
After you've correctly chosen what personality best reflects your genitals, Step 2 is to create a Pinterest board based on your selected shape. No, that doesn't mean you have to collect images of vaginas from the Internet and post them to Pinterest (that's what 73 percent of Tumblr is, after all). In this case, you merely have to go with stuff that reminds you of meticulously shorn vaginas, we guess. So if your pubic hair is shaped like a lightning bolt, you'd probably want to post pictures of Doc Brown or electric chairs or something like that.
Afterward, strangers as young as 13 years old (according to the official rules) will vote for their favorite assortment of photos that bring to mind pubic hair -- Hoover Dam, Thomas Edison, Mjolnir -- and the winners will come away with various prizes that are also vaguely themed around their pubic preference. For example, if you chose the heart shape, then you're clearly some sentimental cry-factory, so you get a flower pillow and ice cream holder so you don't freeze your pretty little hands while watching Drew Barrymore movies and eating Haagen-Dazs on the couch.
You also get the complete Reese Witherspoon Criterion Collection on Blu-ray.
And of course, if you raze your junk into a star shape, then you must like stars, so you get a bunch of shit with stars on it because, well, you like astronomy or astrology or something.
Although technically, we guess those are actually vagina shapes.
Other prizes make less sense -- what does the hat the lawyer wore in Jurassic Park have to do with the Bare-Muda Triangle style? Why does "The Landing Strip" get a big pillow with a D on it? Of course, this free-association contest itself is fundamentally flawed, since there's no way to verify if the participants are in fact adopting the styles, if contestants are shaving with Quattro razors, or if this promotion was the result of a bunch of MBA students who went to a Senor Frogs with a wipeboard and scrawled "SOCIAL MEDIA + VAGINAS = ."
In any case, we can't wait for the inevitable men's version from Gillette, "Shave Your Dick for Dickcember."
