This past weekend my best girl and I were doing some shopping, and that included a trip to a cosmetics store that is part of a large retail cosmetics chain. I did what dutiful husbands do, which is to carry the store-branded carrying bag while the "expert" picked out the items she needed ("This", she is fond of saying, "doesn't just happen!").
So in the course of the expedition wandering through aisles of products of which I had not the slightest understanding, we came upon the section devoted to scents -- perfume, eau de toilette, that sort of thing. They even had a little remote corner for men, but I digress.
In that perfume section, there was among the many options, a number of scent lines bearing the name of this celebrity or that who had endorsed -- possibly, if you read their websites, even once actually smelled -- the fragrance in the expensive bottles aligned under their name. And then I noticed one name that got me thinking.
Ariana Grande.
Ariana Grande, as you know, is the Italian-American 22-year-old singer who, before redeeming herself after the Paris concert attack, had got herself into a pile o' trouble a year or so back for a petulant little rant in a little bakery where she licked small pastries for sale, and declared famously that she "hates America and hates Americans." While Americans are typically not big fans of petulant 22-year-old girls who lick baked goods offered for sale, either, that's beside the point.
I have an opinion of Ariana Grande, shaped by that episode, and it is naturally not a good one. So my reaction on seeing that she had a fragrance product line, after joking that it ought to smell like fresh baked goods, was that we would not be buying anything she endorsed. Not only no, but heck no, we wouldn't.
Then I really started thinking. To be fair, if we were not going to buy a product branded with the name of the doughnut-licking, immature singer, then I'd have to be really careful about the products endorsed with the name of other people, right? For example, the fragrances available included names like Kors, Armani, Taylor, Gaultier, Versace, Smith and the like. How do I know that those individuals haven't had some equally disgusting episodes?
Or that they're communists. Or sweat-shop owners. Or ISIS sympathizers. Or liberals.
Of course, the answer is that I don't have a clue. And for a bottle of cologne, I'm not going to take the time to look up anything; if I don't already have a memory of an episode the particular named person was involved with, then I guess I'm going to be in the dark.
But if I'm never going to buy anything named with "Ariana Grande" because of what she did, then I guess I'm going to have to presume that the other people whose names are on such products may just have likely done something offensive that, had I known about it, would have bent me toward ignoring their endorsed lines. I don't know what that might have been, but given what celebrities do these days, it seems like a pretty reasonable thing. After all, after stupid remarks he made, I will never watch a Quentin Tarantino movie, not that I ever had before or planned to.
So I think my default position is going to be that by buying a product with someone's name on it, I'm tacitly endorsing their lifestyle, their views and their politics, and it just seems a whole lot safer to have a policy of not buying products with celebrity names on them, ever. Seems pretty reasonable to me.
Now, about those Donald Trump ties ... where is the nearest department store?
Copyright 2017, 2015 by Robert Sutton