I watch a movie every day, but I haven’t seen a new movie in close to a year. It takes a substantial mental effort for me to devote 2 hours to a movie that I haven’t seen before because I don’t like giving new things a chance, especially something that requires my undivided attention for a prolonged period (and may not be any good). I usually select a movie from a personal catalog of 50, which means I have seen some movies over 300 times, and will often watch the same movie several nights in a row for several weeks and sometimes months. And this behavior is nothing new, when I was a kid I watched Jurassic Park every afternoon for over a year. My thoughts were that it was entertaining, I liked the story, and I because I have seen it before I knew the movie wasn’t going to disappoint me.

Of the movies I watch, 90% of them were made before the year 2000 because movies sucked less back then. The reason why movies were better “back in my day” is because there wasn’t this dependence on special effects by moviemakers, which has also become an addiction amongst moviegoers. Special effects are fine when we are talking about practical embellishment, such as using CGI for a movie about dinosaurs. Obviously we can’t go out and audition a dinosaur for the role, and using special effects to make something look real is necessary so you aren’t sucked out of the film back to reality by something that is clearly fake. Special effects are not fine when they are used to distract you from realizing that the movie is terrible and the filmmakers are a bunch of hacks.

Fragrance in skin care is the special effect in a terrible blockbuster because it is there to distract you from the fact that you are paying top dollar for garbage in a bottle. Furthermore, those "chemists" who formulated it would be better off formulating slop for farm animals. Every moisturizer in high-end department stores has fragrance which is tantamount to seeing a big-budget movie with a plot that goes nowhere, but the A-list actors and sparkly effects distracted you so well that you never realized that the movie you just spent 2 hours and 20 bucks watching contained not even a grain of modest substance. Fragrance isn’t skin care because it does nothing to improve the health of your skin, but it does lure you in to buying an otherwise ineffective and inferior product. How many times have you bought a moisturizer because it smelled nice? But did that smell take away your dryness or wrinkles?

We have become so accustomed to a pretty smelling product that we forgot what that product was originally designed to do: care for our skin. Nowadays we are suckered into buying a product because of how it smells, and we neglect our skin in the process in favor of our nose. The problem is that we may pass over a truly beneficial product because it doesn’t smell luxurious, and choose a perfumy moisturizer instead that is doing more harm than good. Since fragrance has been shown to cause dryness and irritation, yet is in every “luxury” skin care cream on the market, we need to start exclaiming that the emperor isn’t wearing any clothes, fragrance isn't luxury skin care, fragrant skin care is poorly formulated garbage masked by fragrance.

We should also be outraged that companies with millions (and sometimes billions) at their disposal employed 3rd tier chemists with a freshman's understanding of biology to formulate a product that has a direct impact on your health. If I purchased a moisturizer from a company with endless resources, I expect the best. If fragrance is in your skin care you are getting the worst.

When a product is good, no gimmick is necessary. I don’t need to see an ad for Coca Cola to want one. I’m a soda junkie and I know the good stuff when I taste it. I don’t require a million-dollar ad campaign, celebrity endorsement, and elaborate packaging to lure me in. The great tasting formula lured me in and that’s all I require to want more. When an inferior product needs to be sold, it requires a gimmick to do so. Fragrance is the gimmick that has been ingrained in skin care for so long we don’t even realize it anymore. We now assume that if a product smells fragrant that it must be good, and a product that doesn't isn't worth our consideration. We have been fooled for decades, and our skin is suffering in the process. So next time you are at the cosmetic counter and the skin care has fragrance, ask yourself why, because that fragrance is not improving the health of your skin, so why is it there and what is it covering up?