Friday 20 November 2009

Peru's Tyler Durden harvests human fat for European cosmetics


Waiter, there's a tramp in my soap. Oh, what price will we pay for beauty?

I read gruesome news from Peru where a team of serial killers, who probably smoked too much crack while watching Fight Club, have nicked (or influenced) Tyler Durden's macabre business plan, harvested the fat from scores of victims over the past  30 years, and sold it to the European cosmetics industry. Oh, yes, the victims had to be dead in order to extract every bit of fatty goodness from their cadavers.

And so capitalism crawls into its final decrepit stage where it's gone gaga as well as sclerotic. In Fight Club, Chuck Pahlaniuk's magnum opus, Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) finances his bid to bring down the whole sorry edifice by stealing liposuction fat from cosmetic surgeries. Not only the finest fat there is, but also one of the finest metaphors for what capitalism is doing to us.

"We're taking their own fat and selling it back to them," he gloats — posh hand-made soaps that he supplies to department store beauty counters at the silly prices silly women will pay.

The authorities have arrested the perps but are still seeking the middle-men who bought the fat off them.

So I cast a sharp eye over the rows of oils and unguents cluttering my vanity shelves and ask myself — who's in this?  Puh-leaze don't let it be the Clarins ...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ooo that is so gross. I was wondering whether these European cosmetics firms questioned where the fat came from. Or, more to the point, whether they cared where it came from?

It is just so vile and the victims were people nobody gives a damn about or miss, anonymous people on the margins...but hey, let's take your fat!

Anonymous said...

Now that is disgusting!

My own cosmetics related fact: did you know women end up eating, on average, 2.7 kilos of lipstick during a lifetime?

Given that 50% of all branded lipsticks contain lead, that's not a very healthy habit to have!

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