Cellulite Cream Works!
...At improving cellulite cream-selling companies bottom lines. Jessica Seigel writes in The New York Times:

THE marketing campaign generating so much free publicity for a giant cosmetics company shows real women, rather than anorectic teenagers, in white bras and panties posing next to the slogan, "New Dove Firming. As tested

I personally love the images, but woe to Neanderthals like Richard Roeper, a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times, who derided the Dove gals as "chunky," igniting apoplexy over how much of a male chauvinist pig he is. With the ink flying, Mr. Roeper defended himself as just being honest - something we never doubted.

If only Dove would also come clean about its firming lotions. The truth is that anticellulite creams don't work.

That's why Dove, which is owned by Unilever, makes the campaign about images, not facts. Perhaps that explains why the multinational company's elaborate marketing includes a 48-page report on women's attitudes about beauty, but not one sentence giving information about how its firming ointments were "tested on real curves," reducing flesh dimpling in just two weeks.

Despite my repeated requests, Dove declined to release testing data - not surprising considering the pseudo-scientific babble driving this more than $40 million market, according to figures from research firms NPD Group and Information Resources.

Of course, snake oil isn't all bad. The Dove lotions largely contain glycerin, an old-fashioned moisturizer that your grandmother might have used. And studies show that women see improvement from fake creams with no active ingredients - a visual placebo. Considering today's pressure to be beautiful, women may need that.

But according to 27 years of medical literature recently reviewed in the Journal of Cosmetic and Laser Therapy, scientific proof that creams make a real, lasting difference does not exist. "There is no evidence to show that any topical medications improve cellulite," says Dr. Mathew Avram, the study's author and a Harvard Medical School faculty member.

Yet marketers and even some doctors promote the idea that lumpy flesh is a shameful but treatable condition caused by aging and obesity. That is, if you call puberty "aging," because that's when skin dimpling first appears, likely connected to the release of female hormones. (For that reason, oral contraceptives may worsen skin puckering, and males who lose testosterone after prostate surgery may develop it.)

Cellulite is a concocted idea imported from France. Hardly a disease or condition, it is how fat is arranged inside the female body, especially on thighs, hips and rear. And it affects some 90 percent of adult women. To change it, says Dr. Avram, you'd have to rejigger underlying body architecture, which is why exercising and losing weight helps some. But only some. "What you have here is normal female physiology," he says. "Skinny women have it too."

How do women not know that this stuff is a crock? I never buy any of that stuff -- not that I have cellulite, probably thanks to my running -- but I just ignore all that wrinkle-repair cream ads, too. It's all crap. Black women I know put vaseline on their skin for moisturizer. That seems to work. The cheapest stuff, in fact -- like Ponds cold cream -- works best. Anything else, you're paying for marketing lies and coverups -- which is like paying a fine for being stupid.