Soft and Beautiful

While doing the dishes this morning, I was remembering the 15 seconds flash-ads that interrupted, especially during the best parts, the most dramatic scenes of the craziest romantic love stories I used to watch on TV when I was younger. Targeted to housewives, who, according to the soap opera’s logic, had attained with their marriage the ultimate state of romantic bliss, each ad insisted to be the only one with the strongest grease cutter in the market that also left hands "soft and beautiful".

These ads perfectly idealized the dirty and smelly chore of doing the dishes. I especially remember one that began showing a clean plate under a jet of water held by a pair of stunning women hands that looked like masterpieces of a Hollywood’s manicurist. The model housewife places carefully the last plate in the dryer, and with deep satisfaction turns around smiling happily to her "male significant other", who in turn reciprocates her act of love by smelling and kissing her hands --oh, so endearing. (Yes, because with this product, your hands will smell great no matter what have been on those plates.)

It never dawned on to me that in these ads the person doing the dishes was never a man. Neither as a girl had I ever questioned it. But this morning, I begin to daydream of how I would market dishwasher soap for men that would entice them to do the dishes. First, I would announce it contains a “virility enhancer”. A new scientific formula, this enhancer would be a combination of a pheromone of a wild, hyper-sexual animal that is not in the endangered species list (how about the macaque?); the perspiration of some attractive super-athlete like Michael Jordan; and a designer fragrance called “Viagra Cologne.”

The model for the advertising campaign must have the looks of Kenau Reeves or George Clooney: eternally beautiful, athletic, with a cool, bloody killer’s look, and a super masculine sexy smile that turns on even men. Of course, whoever it is has to have beautiful hands. At the end of the ad, instead of showing his woman tenderly smelling and kissing his hands for completing lovingly his task, she gets much exited, and even when he has not finished, she impulsively begins to take his clothes off. They do not make it to the bedroom, but do it wildly on the kitchen floor. Then the camera slowly blurs and fades out, as an image of the product appears on the TV screen and in the background you hear sounds of a soccer stadium crowd shouting the product name during a score: Tigrooooool! Then a Pamela Anderson’s like voiceover in a very deep raspy voice finishes the ad with this line: …Tigrol… For men with soft hands, but very macho...