777: Pore Strips
| Pore Strips |
 Title text: I'm sure they're a harmful tool of the cosmetics-industrial complex and all, but my goodness do those strips ever work to pull gunk out of your pores. I was shocked, disgusted, and vaguely fascinated by the result. |
Explanation
This comic shows a box of "Deep-cleaning pore strips," which are a skin-care product designed to clean your pores. You stick them on your face, wait a while, and then rip them off. When they come off, a whole lot of disgusting gunk, like dirt and body oils, is allegedly lifted out of your pores with them. The kind shown in the comic, however, is "deep cleaning", and rips out not only the user's pore gunk, but also his entire skull. However, the skull looks extremely clean, so the cleaning has probably worked.
The title text indicates that while Randall is aware that pore-cleaning strips are useless and possibly harmful products created to make money by "solving" something that isn't actually a problem, they seem quite effective at getting things out of the pores on a person's nose. In reality, pore strips only remove excess material (dead skin, oil, dirt, etc) from the surface of the skin, and do not effectively clean one's pores. Randall appears to be unaware of this fact, though this dishonesty on the part of the manufacturer may tie in to the potentially malicious nature of the 'cosmetics-industrial complex' (see below).
The title text refers to the cosmetics industry as the "cosmetics-industrial complex", which is a play on the term "military-industrial complex", coined by Dwight D. Eisenhower, the 34th president of the United States.
Transcript
- [A box of pore strips, marked "deep cleaning."]
- [Cueball examines the box.]
- [Cueball applies strip to face.]
- [Cueball pulls on strip.]
- [Cueball pulls skull out of head with pore strip.]
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Cyriak reference? --Jiří Dobrý (talk) 10:52, 18 November 2013 (UTC)
I'm not sure because I can't quite see, but I think the strip just pulled out his skull, leaving his skin. This also makes more sense considering the labels on the box. If this is true, someone needs to fix the explanation. Athang (talk) 22:29, 1 May 2014 (UTC)
- Done. 108.162.237.218 08:19, 7 May 2014 (UTC)
Please be aware that the little dark spots on your nose (the ones that all look the same size with no obvious swelling) are supposed to be there, they aren't dirt or an infection, and using pore strips to remove them won't help, and they come back anyway. -Pennpenn 108.162.250.162 04:22, 13 August 2015 (UTC)
Title text explanation? -dudinacas 198.41.239.34 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)
Alas, poor Yorick! DPS2004'); DROP TABLE users;-- (talk) 17:11, 20 September 2019 (UTC)
Those "deep cleaning" strips are an even bigger scam than the "look at all the stuff that was in your carpet" shampoers. They prey on the fastidious of people ignorant about what kind of "mess" is perfectly normal and healthy. —Kazvorpal (talk) 05:26, 25 October 2019 (UTC)
