Bitches Brew

SCENE I. A cavern. In the middle, a boiling nail polish bottle.


Thunder. Enter the three Bitches.

First Bitch
Thrice I've backstabbed my best friend.
Second Bitch
Thrice and once today I've whined.
Third Bitch
I am SO bored--'Tis time, 'tis time.
First Bitch
Round about the bottle go;
Add like, whatever, I don't know.
Eye of newt; some blood of ducks;
That should be good for sixteen bucks.
Looks kind of dirty, but don't panic;
Charge extra--call the brand organic.
ALL
Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.
Second Bitch
The bottle's full of our creation,
No more room for punctuation;
Forget the tired, trite, possessive,
"Bitches Brew"'s much more expressive.
We brew a lot besides just potions:
Moisturizers, perfumes, lotions.
You know it takes more than a wand
To get Three's tacky cauldron-blonde.
ALL
Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and cauldron bubble.
Third Bitch
So anyway, that lame Macbeth,
Let's bring him to an early death.
He's so not hunky, and that wife!
Your hands are clean--please get a life!
After we've got him in our thrall
We'll head out to the nearest mall.
My jeans have been untimely ripp'd,
And for Bitch One, I've got a reason:
Your black cat is SO last season.
Bitch Two, you'll never catch a thane
Til Birnam wood reach Dunsinane.

Cool As

Do you American folks ever wonder if it is just our overheated advertising industry that is responsible for nail polish monstrosities? Finally, I have evidence of a foreign crime worth extraditing (graciously submitted by fabulous Aussie reader Jade).


(photo by Jade)

Cool As? Cool As What? I don't know if I can handle the suspense! A refreshing mountain spring? The von Trapp child Maria forgot about and left in the Alps? That gum I keep seeing commercials for where everything suddenly becomes an ice cavern and for some reason you can then talk to women with ease? Damn it, Jim, I'm a doctor, not a thermometer!*

What we really need here is some scientific rigor. (Or with this polish, rigour?)



Dear John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation: I am willing to devote my career to placing this nail polish at its appropriate point on the Coolness Scale. Send grant money and research assistants, stat.

*Not actually a doctor.

Princesses Rule!

I'm pretty sure that, by definition, they don't.

Give Me Moor!

Wow, really? Really? How did nobody's offensiveness radar go off when you named a nail polish after a race of people, colored it to approximate their skin tone, and then asked to possess them? Follow-up question: if you have a white nail polish, do you need to keep this one next to it at all times so that you don't wake up one day to find your white polish bottle lying mysteriously broken underneath a tiny little pillow? In this case, I think OPI named neither wisely nor too well.

Granted, it is conceivably possible that OPI was going with another definition of "moor" (although not likely, seeing as this comes from the "Espana" collection). If we are talking about land forms, though, a moor is about as unpleasant and useless as you can get. Does whoever named this really want a desolate, infertile, and somewhat soggy piece of English countryside? Nor does swapping from "Moor" to "moor" really improve the romantic connotations in either healthiness or happy endingness.

Let's just agree to cut our losses and stick with the verb, then, shall we? I'll moor you to whatever you want. Just promise to stay there.

Deer Valley Spice

Here is a list of things that should be named "Deer Valley Spice":

1) A scented candle used in a hunting lodge
2) The mildly scandalous gossip column on the back page of a Massachusetts preparatory school newspaper
3) The cologne dabbed behind the ear of an ever-so-smooth 46-year-old gentleman as he prepares to head out to the local bar with all the temptingly tipsy co-eds
4) An exotic blend of seven different kinds of pepper that you buy at Williams Sonoma because it's only $8.95 and you just know it will give your arugula salad that little extra something, but no matter how hard you strain your taste buds, it just tastes like regular pepper, and then you realize that you don't even like arugula
5) The racy series of novels that results when the Sweet Valley twins grow up to find that the Unicorn Club has developed into a prostitution ring...but can Elizabeth's journalistic skills save the day?


(suggested by Gillian)

This nail polish, however, is none of these things. Nor is it remotely near the color of a deer, a valley, or any spice found in nature. In fact, the only image that comes into my head when I try to associate this shade with deer-filled valleys is of a woman with avaricious pink claws stroking the pelt of Bambi's mother, trying to decide whether she will have it made into a coat or a stole. I guess this is, after all, somewhat fitting. When it comes to both Bambi and names like this, the real enemy is Man.

Lemonade Stand By Your Man

Honey, let me give you a little advice. If you are having issues with your man, you might want to consider whether they spring from the fact that you appear to be the owner and operator of a lemonade stand, a time-honored profession practiced primarily by eight-year-olds. Statistically speaking, this means that your man is probably either a pre-teen or a pedophile. Either way, we're not really talking about a class of men noted for their deep emotional constancy, am I right? While I don't want to impugn your true and enduring love, I'm just saying that the next time your man reaches into his wallet to leave a quarter on your nightstand, you might want to take a peek at his driver's license and see if his name is Humbert Humbert.


Furthermore, while "Before and After" may be my favorite category on Wheel of Fortune, this does not make it an appropriate nail polish naming mechanism. (To any OPI namers who insist that before-and-after with Every Word Capitalized is a viable human method of communication, let me riposte by saying that Your Momma Is So Fat That The Probability She Occupies A Randomly-Selected Point Within A Room Is One Day I Am Going To Learn How To Send My Fist Through The Internet And Punch You In The Face.)

Actually, I greatly prefer this name when taken literally, i.e., Lemonade Stand in Close Geographical Proximity to Your Man. This take on it raises all sorts of interesting questions. I mean, there are not a lot of lemonade stands, so it's pretty unlikely that your man just happens to be near one. Did you seduce your man based solely on his convenient distance from the nearest lemonade-serving establishment? The fact that you named your nail polish after the lemonade stand rather than your fellow leads me to believe this may be your general order of priorities. It's OK to be honest, I love lemonade too. Also, what if your man doesn't remain stationary all day? If your lemonade stand stays put while he moves around, your nail polish would be unacceptably out of vogue. I think the only solution is a lemonade version of that Japanese vending-machine skirt. Manufacturers, call me. We can split the profits fifty-fifty.

Iris I Was Thinner

Well, this is charming on every level. By "every level" I mean the 1.4 levels of meaning I am willing to grudgingly grant OPI because they are probably feeling extremely proud of their clever non-pun and I don't want to make them cry, and by "charming" I mean "incredibly off-putting and really messed up."

Hey, guess what, OPI? Nails are the one part of everyone's body that they pretty much feel OK about. Nobody's nails are too fat!



The nail polish industry has a special place in the world of make-up because nail polish is the only product that cannot be used to make you look like the more attractive person you're not. Nobody (I hope) is using nail polish to even out their blotchy skin tone, to make their tiny eyes look bigger, to make their cheekbones more prominent. Nail polish is something a woman (or man) does to please her-(or him)-self--what color do I want my nails to be, just because I like that color?

So, you know, thanks for ignoring that whole ability you had to make nail polish the only "beauty" industry segment free from the need to make women feel bad about themselves in order to sell more products. You didn't have to make this about disguising flaws; it could have been about celebrating choices.

Instead, you're a nail polish bottle calling itself fat.