Why Perth will never equal Paris

Paris, NY, London and Milan – the fashion capitals of the world. Exciting hubs of cutting edge design and stylish good taste. Where the beautiful flock to see and be seen, and designers fight to outdo each other, sending one unwearable outfit after another down the catwalk.

Perth on the other hand – not so much a hub as a gaping hole. The universal dumping ground for the last 3 decades worth of dodgy trends. A place that shops everywhere send their unwanted stock to, and the fashion police earn more in a weeks overtime than your average divorce lawyer would in a year.

Lord only knows why some of the clothes shops are so bad here, it’s not like there isn’t online access to the rest of the world and a constant supply of current fashion magazines. Perhaps it’s because the city is so isolated that it’s inhabitants just don’t care, or because the over zealous customs officials are rooting out all the best stuff and selling it off on Ebay. Whatever the reason, I’d have to say trends here seem to be at least a good 20 years behind the rest of the world.

Think ‘Hillbilly Chic’. A sort of trucker meets 80′s Chav meets unwashed backpacker.

Of course the limited choice of shops really don’t help. They are enough to turn even the most fashion conscious into the worst sort of fashion victim – or phobic. The options range from the likes of Kmart, Target and BigW for your cheap and cheerful basics – with basic being the operative word. Most garments seem to fall apart in the wash, beg for mercy under the heat of a gentle iron or change several dress sizes hours after being removed from the hanger. You get what you pay for of course, so for kids clothes, which have a shorter life span than the average family camera, these shops are great.

At the other end of the rather abysmal spectrum is Myers and David Jones. Both shops are supposedly the ‘Creme de la creme’ of Aussie shopping. Say no more. I’ve been into each a few times, but have never seen anything either particularly special or stylish, let alone affordable. I had a voucher to use up for David Jones recently, and it took me several visits to try and find anything that I even wanted to buy. In the end I settled for a pyjamas top. I only managed half an outfit as the top alone came to more than the voucher, and I was loathed to fork out even more for something I didn’t actually need.

Several washes later and the stitching on the top had all but unravelled. The fabric had also stretched so much on the sides that if I’d leapt off our roof, I could probably have coasted all the way out to Rottnest on a wind current.

Funnily enough a set of pyjamas I bought from Big W 3 winters ago are still going strong.

When talking to other POMS here, the one shop that most seem to miss is NEXT. If I had a decent pair of well fitted jeans for every time someone asked why they can’t open a store in Perth, my wardrobe would be overflowing with denim.

Clothes aside, there also seems to be an underlying scruffiness ingrained into the WA culture. The mullet for instance is incredibly popular over here, and it’s not uncommon to see an entire family out and about, all sporting matching scraggly rats tails down their backs. I think that like the fashion, photos in mens barbers over here must be somewhat outdated.

The other trend, one that never ceases to amaze me, is the notion that footwear is entirely optional. Now I’m not talking about going barefoot to the park or the beach – that would be understandable. I’m referring to those I’ve seen without shoes in IKEA, the city centre, restaurants, supermarkets, the cinema and the most dangerous of all, or so you’d think, Bunnings.

Revolting, dirty looking feet aside,  surely there have to be some serious health and hygiene laws being broken as kids run across the urine soaked floors of the public toilets and straight down the fresh produce aisle of the neighbouring supermarket.

And needless to say, if such people don’t ever wash their feet, it’s highly unlikely they’d wash their hands..

I followed one such woman and her snot encrusted child around Coles last week, and snapped her for with my phone for proof. Given that she looked like she was probably capable of beating me to death with one of those blocks of cheese, I’ve airbrushed her features slightly. But to be honest, I very much doubt she’d ever stumble across my blog, or be able to read this post.

This shoeless woman I have to say was certainly not alone. I spotted several others, overgrown toe nails and all, hot footing it through the freezer section.

asfa

asfa

Perhaps people in WA feel there’s no point bothering with their appearance, because there’s really nowhere to dress up and go. I can relate to this, and know from experience it’s a very easy and highly dangerous trap to fall into. Before you know what’s happened, you can find that you’ve metamorphosed into a homeless bag lady, wearing the same old tracksuit for 6 days in a row and have forgotten to change out of your PJs on Sunday.

Now I’ve never been one for making a huge effort with clothes, or really caring that much about how I look, but a while back I realised I was starting to stoop to such a level. This was around the time I arrived at the school to collect my daughter and realised, as I went to get out the car, that I’d left the house in my slippers.

So the following weekend, when heading out to Coles to do the weekly shop, I dug around in the back of my wardrobe and put on a jacket, a scarf and my high-heeled boots – the sort of clothes I’d have once worn in the UK when popping out to fill the car up with petrol. Taking it one daring stop further, I took my hair out of a pony tail and dusted off my mascara,  pumping the tube vigorously to break the old clumps off the brush.

My son walked straight past me in the hallway, and then did a double take as he disappeared around the corner. I don’t think he actually recognised me. How sad is that.

“Oh you do look pretty Mummy” my daughter said as I appeared from the bedroom, clearly impressed with my ‘Extreme Makeover’. I loosely translated this compliment to mean that I normally didn’t.

“So where are you off to then, seeing as you’re all dressed up?” enquired my slightly suspicious husband.

With that I realised that I had better start making more of an effort, before I reached the day where I would think nothing of going to the shops still wrapped in my duvet, or end up with skin as thick as a rhinos hide on a pair of black and scaly feet.

If it’s not broken, don’t fix it

Why is it that some companies just can’t help themselves. First they give you too much choice, flooding your brain impossible decisions. Then they fiddle around with something that already works perfectly fine – and has done for many, many years.

Take the humble deodorant bottle. It’s simple, straightforward and stops you smelling like a tramp on a hot and humid day. It’s not one of those products that really needs to be fancy. You aren’t likely to ever display it next to the cut glass or amongst the family photos. Far from it, when the deodorant bottle does makes it out of the bathroom and into public view, it is normally being whipped out of a bag and up under a jumper in a quick, trying to be inconspicuous kind of way.

And as for the design. Well it’s small, flat bottomed and rounded on the top. It’s been like this for as long as I can remember and always seemed to do it’s job to me.

So given this, why do the packaging, marketing and design gurus out there have to brainstorm themselves into a corner and come up with a new design. Surely that’s a bit like reinventing the wheel, just for the sake of making it that little bit rounder.

I’m talking, in case your wondering, about the new ‘upside down’ deodorant bottle that seem to be springing up all over the place. The adverts are of course very catchy, implying how much easier and better life would be if you lived it upside down. Would it? Really?  I can think of a number of times right of the top of my head when it wouldn’t be so great. Maybe I’m just a fan of gravity.

Of course being a sucker for new packaging, I went out and brought one. I’m a double sucker really, if you consider my line of work and insider knowledge of how to sell a gimmick to the blissfully unaware.  Still, like my other fellow magpies and lemmings, I like bright, shiny things and am always happy to jump off a cliff at least once. Who knows, maybe I thought life in an upside down world might be more fun, it would certainly put more volume in your hair when you’re drying it…

Oh fool that I am, for listening to heart over head and letting my curious fingers do the buying. The bloody thing is useless. Yes, it dispenses a pleasant white lotion onto my skin, that does, granted, make me smell good. But it also dispenses a pleasant white lotion all over my hands, down the outside of the bottle and onto the floor.

Surely it has been tested by small men in white coats for it’s capacity to spill? So how could this be? Hmmmm. Let’s think for a second.

Oh yes, that would be the incredibly stupid nature of the design. Something perhaps to do with the whole ‘let’s push everything to sit in the bottom of the bottle and then remove the lid’ frighteningly good idea. Now how many marketing monkeys, dressed in skinny jeans and Che Guevara t-shirts did it take to come up with this innovative new crap design?

Did they perhaps think a more aerodynamic shape would help the gloop to leave the rolling ball at a greater speed and velocity? It’s a deodorant not a cruise missile for crying out loud. It doesn’t need to break speed barriers or have more bleeding thrust than a Lamborghini.

But then I though, hang on a minute, maybe it’s just me. Maybe it’s the way I’m holding the bottle. Perhaps after all these years I’ll find out I’ve been doing this, apparently idiot proof task all wrong. Then I noticed my husbands deodorant. Sat there, just like mine, all upside down on the shelf and caked in dried up gloop.

Haaa! It’s not me after all.

I know that products, especially those of the hygiene and beautifying sort do need to shout ‘I’m young, hip and trendy’ as they jostle for your attention on the shelf. They need to have sexy shaped bottles, bright shiny colours and lids that open in 10 captivating new ways. They need to make attention grabbing promise, ones that blind you with science and conjure up images of molecules, test tubes and miracles.

Of course all they really need to say is   ‘Use me today, and you too can have smooth, glowing, wrinkle free skin…. just like this pretty little pre-pubescent model in the poster’. Or even  ‘ Use me today, and you too can have hair that bounces and shines, never fades with age or splits when you brush it… just like this airbrushed, Botox injected, aging actress in the poster’.

That’s right. We did all notice that anti-aging creams are sold by toddlers, shampoos are sold by wind machines and foundations are sold by Photoshop. We may well be gullible enough to part with our cash, but we’re not stupid enough to believe in perfection.

So really packaging, marketing and advertising guys, here’s a revolutionary idea. Instead of spending 100′s of 1000′s messing around with the tried, tested and perfectly acceptable shapes of our bottles, jars and pots of potion, or trying to sneak a fuel injected turbo engine inside the lid, for a slightly faster roll, why not just lower the price instead?

Yes, yes, it’s a radical thought I know. But remember, the average buyer is of a terribly fickle breed. We hunt out discounts. We study the sales, promotions and BOGOFs like the Pope studies the bible. We want value for money and preferably change from a $10 note.  So make your product half the price of that snazzy shaped bottle sat beside it, and then sit back and watch us buy it right off the shelf.

Choice isn’t always a good thing

It is an accepted fact these days that our everyday decisions are now dictated to and in many ways controlled by marketing companies and the hypnotic hold they seem to have over us. Through the power of media they relentlessly bombard us, telling us how we should be living our life, what we want to look like, how we should feel, what we need to eat and when we should be rushing out and spending money we haven’t got. These marketing gurus also seem to have the ability to take an everyday mole hill of a decision for us and turn it into a mountain of dilemma.

Take this morning for example. I went out looking to buy some toothpaste and came back needing half an hour in a darkened room and a packet of Panadol. Had I known beforehand that buying a simple tube of toothpaste was going to be such a challenging lesson in choice and decision making, then perhaps I would have left the house a good 15 minutes earlier and taken along a friend for moral support.

On the surface it might seem like a fairly straightforward mission to accomplish.  A matter of reaching out and grabbing the same one I had used that morning, a whole 60 minutes ago. But ‘simple’ is never something that translates easily from theory into practice. Don’t ask me how, but somewhere between the bathroom sink and the shop floor my memory had somehow erased all memories of which one I normally use.

Incidentally I blame this short term memory loss entirely on having children and as a direct result of all the brain cells that have died due to years of lost sleep.

Anyway, as a consequence of my brain blowing a fuse in this manner, I was now faced with what can only be described as a bank of cardboard boxes, and a terrible case of indecisiveness starting to grow. As someone who has trouble choosing between a blueberry muffin and a chocolate muffin without first checking what my husband is having, this didn’t bode well for my walking out of that shop anytime soon.

This may seem like something of a dramatic exaggeration (something I admit we writers are prone to do from time to time), but this time I kid you not. Stretched out from one end of the aisle all the way down to the shower gel there were no less than 24 different types of toothpaste on display, and this by the way, was ONLY in the Colgate section.

I ask you, 24. Is that really necessary?

All I want from my toothpaste is something to make my teeth shiny and bright enough to stop traffic and to give me breathe as fresh as a packet of Polo’s. What I don’t want is to have to stand there trying to narrow down the choice and make an informed decision about something so incredibly mundane.

Of course I know that when it comes to sales it is purely about the figures and making even more money for Mr Colgate. But please, can’t they take pity on those of us who simply don’t have a spare 15 minutes to scan the packets back and forth and wonder whether we need the Colgate Maximum Cavity Protection Blue Minty Gel, the Colgate Advanced Whitening plus Tartar Control, the Colgate Max White or the Colgate Triple Action..

What does ‘triple action’ even mean? Will it swill your mouth out for you and wipe down the wash basin afterward? If it did they should just say so. The stuff would fly off the shelves and into the homes of anyone who has a child who goes to brush their teeth and leaves a rim of dried on toothpaste scum in their wake.

So here’s what I want to know. If toothpaste is a health and hygiene product and something that we should use at least twice a day, then why does the whole industry have to be turned into such a marketing companies dream and a buyers nightmare. Why can’t they just make ONE toothpaste that does the lot. Toothpaste at the end of the day is just toothpaste and I find it very hard to believe that the ingredients in each of the 24 different types that Colgate produces can vary so much as to warrant a different name, packaging and price tag.

This overwhelming choice aside, what no doubt has that Tooth Fairy shaking her head in horror is the effect that some of these toothpaste can have on your teeth.

For years I have been coveting the Hollywood smile and buying anything with ‘Whitening’ on the box. Are my teeth any whiter for it? Of course they aren’t. Instead they are now so sensitive that eating an ice cream on a windy day can be something of a challenge. I am also forced into the ’Sensitive’ toothpaste section, one that funnily enough comes at twice the price for half the tube. If I was that way inclined I’d say there was a definite whiff of a conspiracy to be had here. Much the same as if Benson & Hedges sold you cigarettes for years and then charged you double the price again for a new set of lungs.

Of course I am without a doubt the gullible mug for believing what I read on the packet, especially given what I do for a living. My common sense tells me that the promise of gain always results in some sort of pain. But it does make you wonder how safe on our teeth are these Whitening toothpastes over many years of constant brushing abuse?

Are there cages of guinea pigs stowed away somewhere with perfect smiles, but with teeth too brittle to bite through a sunflower seed?

Amongst the many offerings from Colgate there is even the ever so temptingly titled Baking Soda & Peroxide toothpaste. Can that really be safe? While baking soda is great for clearing out blocked drains and peroxide handy if your highlights are growing out, when it comes to teeth they both sound harsh enough to strip off all the enamel from a 100 paces.

Last year 3 brands of Chinese toothpaste, Tri Leaf Spearmint, Cool Mate and Heibeing were banned when they were found to have contained potentially lethal levels of a toxic chemical called DEG (diethylene glycol). This is an industrial solvent used in paint and anti freeze and can cause kidney and liver damage. Counterfeit Colgate toothpaste also turned up in the US last year, containing the same dangerous chemicals.

It’s enough to make you wonder what other hidden ingredients you are swilling around your mouth. Are we that generation of human guinea pigs so swayed by clever advertising and slick marketing that we are willing to use anything if it sounds to good to be true? And if so, which parts of our bodies will be turning green and dropping off in years to come?