Hygiene Product Jargon

I know this may seem a little off-topic for Lies and Gasoline, but given that the first word in the blog’s title is “lies,” this topic fits perfectly. I’m talking about something we’ve all seen. This is something we’ve all looked at and said, “Really? Something’s not right about that.” This issue pisses some people off more than others, but the fact is that it needs to be addressed right here and right now. I am, of course, talking about outrageously redundant hygiene product jargon. This is when shampoo or moisturizer companies combine a simple word, which we can all understand, with another that sounds vaguely scientific, and thus create a new word that suggests the product which you hold in your-soon-to-be-moisturized hands contains some groundbreaking new ingredient produced in the world’s most sophisticated beauty lab. This ingredient is so new, so special, that it requires a new merged moniker.


Anyone who remembers high school biology, however, can see through this guise and ascertain that pro-vitamins are really just plain old vitamins. I mean really: what alternative are we left with. Neg-vitamins? Who the fuck is going to buy negative vitamins, vitamins which I assume work hard toward deteriorating your health. But they can’t just call them vitamins because everybody has heard of goddamn vitamins, so they call them pro-vitamins. Oooo, fancy.


I saw one the other day that made me laugh, while a piece of my soul died from witnessing such painful ineptitude. A new shampoo promised the volume-building effects of micro oils. What the fuck is a micro oil? Is it a really tiny oil? Does that even make sense? You don’t need to talk to a scientist to know that oil is a liquid. It can be as small or as large as you want it to be. Or maybe they are referring to the sub-atomic particles that make up the oil. If that’s the case then the same criteria applies universally. I had some micro Cheerios for breakfast with some micro milk and used my micro spoon to shove the micro food in my micro mouth. Regardless, I only buy shampoo with macro oils.


My all time favorite hygiene product jargon is amino protein. As a biologist, this one really drives me crazy. The redundancy of this term is equivalent to saying iron steal or coffee bean coffee. It’s where the product in question is preceded by a word that describes the only substance in the product. Proteins are the building blocks of life. They are made up of smaller particles called amino acids. They do not have anything else in them, just amino acids. If a protein has no amino acids then it is not a protein. You probably see where this is going. Every single protein in the known world is an amino protein. There is no other kind. That’s why we don’t call them amino proteins, we call them proteins. It is more efficient this way, trust me. And you also don’t sound like a total idiot.

If anybody has anymore to add, let’s hear ‘em.

Professor P