Now, I’m a sucker for any kind of grocery-based promotion. Any contest which requires you to consume some variety of perishable much faster than you healthily should, in order to determine if some sort of prize is at the bottom of the packet, really tickles my marketing-related-activities g-spot.

The latest contest I’d noticed on our weekly grocery haul was a promotion on our shampoo. Our haircare brand of choice (no, despite the fact my hair is shaved as closely as possible to my head, not just soap: I’m gay etc etc) has been running a special promotion revolving around diamonds.

Apparently, if you manage to locate a plastic diamond-shaped object in your shampoo bottle, you’ll be bestowed with a real, valuable and shiny diamond.

Do I give a shit about the real diamond? No. The plastic diamond is of far more interest to me. “Look at my synthetic resin-based sharp pointy thing representing immeasurable wealth,” I could cry to friends.

If I had any.

This caused me to create much more foam action during my daily shower time than was really necessary, just to get to the bottom of the bottle to see if I’d won a plastic diamond. I was burning through that shampoo bottle faster than the last half hour of the ARIA Awards, when the producers apparently realised giggly Rove was off his face on crack and hastened up the proceedings a little.

I’d begun cleaning parts of my body far more viciously and thoroughly than daily hygiene really required. Certain orifices screamed for mercy from the relentless cleansing (and burning chemicals). There was enough foam on my head in that shower for me to pass as an albino Marge Simpson.

I guess things began to get out of hand once I was generating enough shampoo foam in my desperation to check the bottom of the bottle, when the drain on our bathroom floor began bubbling up with foam. It looked like some sort of ejaculatory tribute to the executives who thought up L.A. Ice Cola’s advertising campaign.

Once I’d emptied the bottle of all its shampoo, I shook it expectantly - yet all this resulted in was not rattling, but a rather teasing weightiness remaining in the bottle. Was this the sign of diamond glory?

Unable to wrench the shampoo bottle apart myself, I turned to the aid of a hard, steely tool to open the bottle for me: Adam. After struggling with it for around fifteen minutes, not even he could break open the ridiculously designed bottle, even after trying a variety of methods. (Although I’m sure that he only tried breaking it open over my skull after I began yelling “you’re not a very fucking good diamond miner, are you?” at him).

So now the bottle just sits in the bathroom, mocking me. Christ knows if there’s any diamond glory inside or not.

I’m considering soldering the shampoo bottle to a ring, and presenting it to Adam as a symbol of my “commitment” to make my point.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 20th, 2002 at 8:30 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.