June 2013: Commentary

As many of you know, I've made friends via social media with some of the very fashion models I have featured on this blog - thanks in great part to these same models discovering my blog.  The upside of this is that I get to meet a few of them in person sooner or later.  The downside is that I made a rule for myself - my third rule in this blog's "Criteria, Rules, and Standards" page - not to show any one of these women who's a friend through social media (mainly Facebook) after I've met her in person, and now three more women fall under that rule.  I've already noted that I recently met Catherine Roberts at a party in New York.  Well, I also met at that same party two other models I've featured here whom I became friends with on Facebook, Alva Chinn and Jennifer Brice.  Those of you who read about it on my Miscellaneous Musings blog know the whole story; those who haven't can read it here.

I might have to reconsider this rule and ask myself if I'm straitjacketing myself a bit.  Because although this rule was meant to avoid any appearance of undue favoritism, isn't that what this blog is all about - my favorite women, whether I know them or not?  So, yes, I may have to rethink this rule, but in the meantime, I will allow myself to make exceptions to it if I find any pictures of any of the models I know personally and have met in person that I feel should be featured here, just as I already did with Nancy Donahue not too long ago.  So don't be surprised if any pictures of any of these women appear on this blog in the near future.

Some of you may have noticed, by the way, that while I noted that Catherine Roberts was a L'Oreal spokesmodel in the late seventies, I have never shown pictures from her L'Oreal ads.  There's a reason for that: I don't like them.  The ads she did for that cosmetics brand are actually kind of embarrassing.  Two of them are downright creepy; one shows her wearing a feathered carnival mask, while the other shows her wearing a skin-tight helmet and goggles.  That's a strange way to sell lipstick and nail polish, and, picking up on the peculiarity of any ad showing only part of Ms. Roberts' face rather than all of it, I sometimes wonder what idiot thought that such ads would be a great idea - especially when these two pictures obscure her hair and her eyes, her best features.  Another series of L'Oreal ads she did are just plain silly.  Part of a campaign called "L'Oreal Colors Your World," they depict our heroine wearing lipstick and nail polish in colors named to represent different nationalities and showing her in either a "French," "English," "Russian," or "Scandinavian" setting.  The "English" ad, for example, shows her dressed for a Victorian tea to promote colors in L'Oreal's "Rare English Rosebuds" collection, while the "Scandinavian" ad shows her in a winter coat on "A Walk in Norwegian Woods."  You get the idea . . . alas.  (These ads also show her with men, and I try not to show too many of those here.)

Remember, none of this was Ms. Roberts' idea - she was just the model, and she had to strike the poses that the ad people wanted from her.  Just the same, I'm not going to feature any of these photos from her L'Oreal ads.  It's not worth it. :-D

("Norwegian Woods?" I started to laugh . . ..)