The Pink Patch
The name of this product, the “pink patch,” sounds so innocuous, doesn’t it? It’s a nicotine-patch-like patch (okay that was some awkward construction) that is being marketed to teenage girls as a weight loss tool. (And it’s for girls, so it’s pink of course.)
The takedown of the Pink Patch at Fitness Fixation is just so perfect that I will quote it at length and not even attempt to say it any better:
“I spent most of high school being teased for my weight. The popular girls seemed to have everything: the gorgeous bodies, the cutest boys. I was not going to feel that way in college too! The summer before I left, I tried the Pink Patch. I lost 15 lbs! It changed my life completely. Now I’m in my sophomore year and I’M the popular girl. Thank you Pink Patch!”
The pink patch won’t just make you thinner—you get popularity and happiness too. It changes your life. No exploitative advertising there, of course. No selling sad dreams to the lonely teenagers, the insecure girls who feel ugly and are told they are ugly and assume they have only themselves to blame, themselves and their flawed, imperfectly-sized bodies. It’s not like adolescence is a vulnerable time and all… Why this is just spot-on for our girls…
Now, any lack of evidence supporting the effectiveness of the patch shouldn’t stop the manufacturers from advertising on Facebook and other youth-trafficked sites of course, using pictures of very young women. They gotta target those young girls, because how else are you going to get rich on the backs of our anxious daughters? In fact, they’ll keep sending you pink patches if you don’t cancel your subscription, so they have a built-in way to make money off kids who fail to read the fine print or who aren’t perhaps especially savvy consumers (you know, the kind who might fall for a diet scam in the first place.) And it’s so cute, the pink patch, the little rosy crap sticker that magically melts that offending weight away. Hey girls, soon all your friends will be using it!
Needless to say, this exploitative product has not been tested by the FDA or proven to have any effect on weight loss whatsoever. It’s just a placebo preying on the insecurities of young women. Gross.
Thanks to Mary for the link!
Posted by mo pie
Filed under: Cold Hard Cash, Health, Kids, Weight Loss
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Um, not the MAIN problem with this nonsense, but 15 pounds? To stop the teasing and be ‘life changing’?
What the hell?
Wow. This makes me feel lucky that I only had to deal with the Columbia House Record and Tape Club.
*aims death rays at the marketers of this thing*
Laura Bennett (yes, the Project Runway alum) at Tina Brown’s The Daily Beast actually advocated the use of nicotine patches as a weight-loss aid in her column the other day: http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2008-10-21/how-my-little-slice-of-heaven-became-my-toddlers-hell/.
How dangerous is that?
msmeta
Oops. It was nicotine gum. Sorry. Same thing, really.
Totally veering off topic, here.
Are nicotine patches dangerous?
I mean, don’t people use them in the absence of smoking?
A lot of precription drugs are prescribed for uses other than their initial intent. Some anti-anxiety medications are prescribed to prevent migraines.
Not that you should just use a precsciption for off-label purposes without the express direction of a doctor, but I didn’t know nicotine patches were dangerous.
It’s not something I’ve researched.
Oh, it was nicotine gum….
So, not too dangerous, then, I’m thinking.
I just googled the pink patch. I entered as much as “The Pink” and it was the second result. I love how the website says “may” help your mood, “may” decrease your appetite. And you are right. This is being directly targeted at teenaged girls. There is a special place in hell reserved for these people…
Um. No, nicotine is a poison, quite literally. From the wikipedia nicotine page, toxicology section:
“The LD50 of nicotine is 50 mg/kg for rats and 3 mg/kg for mice. 40–60 mg (0.5-1.0 mg/kg) can be a lethal dosage for adult humans.[19][20] This designates nicotine as an extremely deadly poison. It is more toxic than many other alkaloids such as cocaine, which has an LD50 of 95.1 mg/kg when administered to mice. Spilling a sufficient concentration of nicotine onto the skin can result in poisoning or even death since Nicotine readily passes into the bloodstream from dermal contact.[21]”
The facts you learn from reading too many mystery novels!
This makes me so mad!!!
This reminds me of those horrible ads from the back of teen magazines that would say “It feels SO GOOD to be thin!” with that bone-thin girl with the Tatum O’Neal hair and the string bikini.
That’s so horrible. Popularity.
I was a big girl AND popular in high school. Take that, stupid pink patch!
Following a tangent about off-label meds…
Marketers for Big Pharma(ceutical) companies have been under fire for encouraging/bribing doctors to make off-label prescriptions, that is, taking a medication that is officially approved for one purpose and prescribing it for an condition or purpose that has NOT been reviewed by the FDA. Marketers aren’t allowed to make off-label connections in their campaigns, but doctors have that freedom, and with incentives, many feel free to use it.
Lots of times, the medication being used off-label is running into problems in the area that it was initially approved for–not proving to be effective, or coming up against generic competitors–so the companies have to find another way to recoup their research/marketing budget, and that is find another market, another condition, another demographic.
******
Seaweed extract or pony piss or whatever they’re claiming is the active ingredient in these pink patches… well, that just sounds like your standard weight-loss quackery. It’s definitely unethical to be marketing this shit to pre-teens and teenage girls, akin to shoving credit cards at college freshmen.
Bleah.
Unfreakingbelievable.
Wow, things like this just make me mad! A patch cannot make you lose 15 pounds! They will only further discourage the people who buy the thing.
The photos in these ads bug the heck outta me. Invariably it’s some rail-thin model sportin’ the pink patch. Yeah, cause she really needs that.
Shakes head…
That is very disturbing. I can’t believe that these people are trying to market this product. There is no way that a patch will help you lose weight. All it takes is a healthy diet and exercise and that is exactly what teenage girls should be taught. And there is no such thing as an “ideal” or “perfection,” its ads like these which make teenage girls feel self-conscious.
I declare shenanigans! Get your brooms, people!
*a bazillion points for whoever gets the reference*
It’s not FDA approved. Color me surprised, cause I ain’t. When will they finally just say, “We have extra non FDA approved crap just hanging out back in the warehouse. I know, why don’t we just shovel it into weight loss pills and sell em? It’s not like anyone’s going to check before they take them!”
“Hey that’s genius, even better we’ll sell them to insecure teenage girls by coloring them pink. Who cares if we kill millions of them, it’s not like we know them or their families personally!”
I know it will never happen, but still. It’s nice to think that in Saw 6, Jigsaw will have his way with these people.