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Wrinkle Cream Scams!
By Rayni Joan
If you don't have an ad-blocking application like Mozilla's Adblocker,
you may find your eyes wandering from your free e-mail to a nearby ad
with three enticing words, "Better than Botox," accompanying a
mesmerizing moving graphic depicting disappearing under-eye bags on an
attractive woman's face. Sometimes a blonde. Sometimes a brunette.
First, you see her facial lines. Then, whoosh, the lines vanish.
Powerful stuff, a wrinkle cream that can remove twenty years. Who can
look at that and not imagine her own face "youthifying"? Available on
free trial offer? Pay shipping only? Click here. Done deal. A completely
emotional sale of a product that more often than not, disappoints. What
a surprise!
To give you an idea of the scope of the market for anti-aging products,
there's a study called Drugs and Cosmetics for Aging Boomers: A Surging
Market, by Barbara Breindel, which you can purchase as a PDF file for a
mere $3,967.50 on line. The introduction to the study explains that the
concept of "looking one's age" does not appeal to boomers and that they
are hungry for products which they believe will help create the illusion
of youth. http://www.bio.com/store/product.jhtml?id=prod780014
Several years ago, the writer of this article, a well-educated "woman of
a certain age," decided to try a wrinkle cream and found one on-line
that purported not to erase the wrinkles, but to somehow create shadows
and reflections from a special ingredient - ground-up mirrors - that
gave the illusion that the wrinkles weren't there. Hey, they didn't
pretend to remove wrinkles. Isn't illusion all we can ask for? It wasn't
until the forty dollar jar of wrinkle cream arrived and I saw the name
of it that I realized I'd scammed myself. It was appropriately named
Deception. I walked right into that one. A forty-dollar red-faced
chuckle. No logic. All emotion. Yikes.
In May of 2005, Emily Longnecker of News 5 in Cincinatti did a special
report on some wrinkle cream scams, pointedly concluding that the
products she checked out made only one thing disappear: money. What's
more, some wrinkle creams vendors apparently allow their "free trial" to
become a long, drawn-out nightmare with unwanted credit card charges and
calls to Better Business Bureau that wear down the customer, ultimately
creating anxiety and probably a few new gray hairs and guess what else?
Yeah, wrinkles!
Below are some links. If you pass this article on to your friends,
they'll get the links too. Caveat emptor! Buyer beware!
http://www.scam.com/showthread.php?t=1418
http://blog.supersurge.com/display/ShowPost?moduleId=92669&discussionId=3232&postId=28231
http://www.epinions.com/msg/show_~threads/cat_id_~10/id_~2085/forum_id_~157/pp_~1
http://www.wlwt.com/news/4483564/detail.html
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