Yesterday morning I nearly spit out my Corn Flakes as I read the latest New York Times “Skin Deep” feature, “Treating Cellulite, It’s Still There.” And not because, “the ass pictured is almost cellulite-free, while the story is about the terrible problem of cellulite,” as Gawker’s Hamilton Nolan put it.

Ladies, it shouldn’t be news that anti-cellulite treatments don’t work. Or that cellulite is incurable. Also what shouldn’t be news—but, maddeningly, is—is that most anti-cellulite products and anti-aging creams are illegal and flourishing under the unconscionably laissez-faire FDA. It’s ironic that the “Skin Deep” column takes its title from the great muckraking book of 1934 by Mary Catherine Phillips—one of several books that led to the creation of the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938, which is supposed to protect consumers from bogus cosmetics and drugs.

The act states in no uncertain terms that cosmetics cannot claim to “affect the structure or any function of the body of man.” In other words, cosmetics companies must stick to matters of appearance, not therapy. Cosmetic companies cannot market products that claim to change any aspect of your skin or your skin’s structure or function: Collagen-plumping serums? Illegal. Free radical-preserving goop? Illegal. Cellulite-busting unguents? Illegal.

If a product does makes such a claim it is, by definition, a drug, and needs to go through rigorous testing at the Office of Drug Evaluation and Research to prove not only that it is safe but that it also works. So if a cellulite reduction cream claims to melt cellulite or tighten skin then legally, the claim needs to be tested and cleared by the FDA. This is a basic consumer protection provided by the Act. We should stop tolerating less!

In the 1960s and then again in the 1980s journalists frequently reported on misbranded anti-wrinkle and anti-cellulite products, and the FDA challenged these companies in court. On April 10, 1988, when the FDA was in the midst of its last crackdown, The New York Times published the following in an op-ed: “All the FDA is asking is that fantasy and reality be kept separate. The cosmetic companies need only retreat back to fantasy”—meaning abandon the therapeutic claims for traditional "this will make you gorgeous" puffery—“and their customers will live as happily as before.”

As baby boomers advance into old age we’ve all had to adapt to the anti-aging-centric marketplace and have come to accept and even embrace the proliferation of cosmetics that are actually misbranded drugs. I'm sure the democratization of plastic surgery has a lot to do with this: why opt for a regular bottle of Oil of Olay body cream when you can benefit from the anti-cellulite version? But is it too much to ask the New York Times and other journalists to separate fantasy from reality? And, most crucially, if the FDA did its job we would have known that cellulite was incurable because the $47 million anti-cellulite product market wouldn’t exist and fool us into thinking—or misunderstanding, or blundering, or wondering, or hoping—otherwise.

Tags: anti-aging, beauty, cellulite, cosmetics, F.D.A., skin care, wrinkles

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Lizzie Skurnik's new book on classic teen novels from our past, Shelf Discovery comes out next month. What better woman to weigh in on the intersection of twin adolescent rites of passage: the bat mitzvah and the Farrah 'do. This also is a reminder: Please send us your Farrah haircut pictures to doublex.slate+farrah@gmail.com. Here's Lizzie's description of the lovely photo you see included in this post:

My mother brought me to a black salon RIGHT before my Bat Mitzvah (like the day), [where the hairdresser] gave me what I can only describe as a church haircut instead of just straightening it. That took months to grow out. Then my aunt, who delighted in making a begrudging white salon cut my grandmother's hair, brought me to THAT salon and they gave me this Farrah cut, which at the time was only still sported by matrons in N.J. Hairstyles pressed unsuccessfully on biracial hair may be an unexamined outpost in the land of cultural contructivism.

Tags: 70s, bat mitzvahs, biracial hair, farrah fawcett, farrah fawcett hair, feathered hair

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I'm truly heartbroken. MJ was my very first love. I wrote him letters through his fan club when I was a girl, of course never imagining that his cute baby-face would eventually morph into something that looked like a laboratory creation. I loved him through my teen years and even stuck with him through high school and into my first years of college. By then I was long over wanting to marry him and was doubtful that he even liked girls. Still, watching his physical transformation through the years was heartrending. He was such a beautiful boy when he was just plain black and with a real nose instead of a pasty, cream-colored creation with a plastic plughole. But the interesting thing about MJ’s many physical phases was that with each one he became less a member of any one group and more a musical symbol for all. Of course it was mostly because he was such a fantastic entertainer; his music, his singing, and his dancing skills were unparalleled. But at the same time, gay, straight, and sexually ambiguous people could equally embrace him, as could every racial and ethnic group across the board. That’s why he was once as loved in Japan as he was in South Africa, as he was Moscow, as he was in Harlem or Minnesota. Few entertainers ever reach across so many racial, cultural and geographic lines.

I just wish the kids who now worship only moderately talented here-today-gone-tomorrow music studio creations being passed off a “stars” could have seen the old Michael—pre-sex abuse allegations, freakish face, and oddball behavior—perform.

A few years ago, after turning my little niece on to MJ through his song “Rockin Robin,” which I would sing to her as lullaby, I gave her a CD of MJ from his Jackson Five days. She looked at his picture and asked: "Who is this?"

"Michael Jackson," I said.

"No it's not," she insisted. "Michael Jackson is peach, he's not brown."

She was stating the facts as she saw them, but to me her comments captured just how colorless, and universal, MJ had become. My niece was right. MJ was a peach, flaws and all.

Photograph of Michael Jackson memorial by John Moore/Getty Images.

Tags: michael jackson death

Now that Michael Jackson has gotten what always seemed to be his wish for eternal youth, I expect participants in his secretive life will emerge for a last reminder of the extremely gifted pop star’s lifetime of sad dysfunction. The Jackson Family will surely have a stake in resolving who will attain custody of Jackson’s offspring. Any dispute will no doubt also involve Debby Rowe, the dermatologist’s nurse who bore Jackson his oldest two, 11-year-old son Prince and 10-year-old daughter Paris. Rowe seems to have upheld her end of their strange bargain, but their businesslike marriage ended in businesslike divorce. (He found a less personally taxing way to reproduce by using a surrogate to create his third child, also named Prince II, but nicknamed Blanket).

Speaking of mothers, I doubt we’ll hear again from the housekeeper at Jackson’s amusement park ranch, whose son testified he was molested by her financially generous employer, nor from many other characterless characters characterized in Maureen Orth’s vivid Vanity Fair reporting of Jackson’s icky legal saga. The cataloging and carving up of his convoluted estate, however, will surely be a subject of much scrutiny. What about the Beatles music? Who will get the collection of unpaired gloves? I just read the new owners are already refurbishing Jackson’s former playground ranch.

I went to a Jackson Five show in Las Vegas in the early 1970s. I remember a number that featured tiny family member Janet, then about 6 years old, singing and dancing in a pink boa with her youngest big brother, the adorable teenage Michael. He’s gone from this world, but I hope that boy who performed with his baby sister has found his way to the original Neverland, where nobody has to grow up.

"Everything's falling apart." So begins the first episode of HBO's Hung, a new dramatic comedy that premieres this Sunday, June 28, at 10 p.m. The opening shots highlight downtown Detroit's urban blight, and the economic downturn serves as backdrop for the tale of a man who takes desperate measures to survive financial hardship. Because it's HBO, this particular red-blooded American man doesn't score a part-time position at Starbucks. He becomes a male prostitute.

Thomas Jane stars as Ray Drecker, a once-great athlete who's fallen from his lofty pedestal. His homecoming queen ex-wife (Anne Heche) has left him for a wealthy dermatologist who's kind enough to give her Botox injections in the kitchen while she complains about her failures as a mother, his house has burned to the ground, and his fellow teachers at the high school where he teaches history and coaches basketball are getting laid off left and right. His kids don't even want to live with him anymore. "What happened to my life?" Drecker laments.

Looking for a way out of the mess, Drecker attends a get-rich-quick seminar, "Unleash Your Inner Entrepreneur," in which he is advised to discover his "one winning tool" that will turn him into a multimillioniare. Drecker doesn't have any clever ideas, but he does have one thing going for him: He's very well hung.

While Jane's Drecker is a bit of a lummox, and the show's thin premise is little more than a protracted dick joke, the pilot's director, Alexander Payne (Election, Sideways), guides our hero through a myriad of rotating relationships with women played by brilliant female character actresses. To get work, Drecker teams up with sometimes-lover-and-fellow-seminar-attendee Tanya Skagle (Jane Adams), a flailing poet who's brilliant idea is Lyric Bread: bits of poetry stuffed into baked goods. (The inside of her left wrist reveals a tiny tattoo: "proust.") Regardless of her lefty leanings, Skagle decides her gift with words is destined to market Drecker's new sex work career. "I'm hoping to make money and bring something positive into the world at the same time," she explains dreamily to a well-connected woman the pair use to solicit wealthy female clients for Drecker's budding business.

Being a male prostitute isn't easy, apparently. You won't be hearing any of Hung's more memorable one-liners on network TV anytime soon. "Good cock is hard to find," one woman observes. "Why can't they just fuck me for me?" Drecker grouses. And then there's: "I hear you've got a big one."

Ultimately, Hung can't quite make up its mind whether it's a penis joke masquerading as a TV show, or a sometimes insightful look at the strange relations between men and women laid bare when things get intimate. The series' best moments come during the all-too-rare sex scenes wherein both parties let down their guard, and Hung shows us what we haven't yet seen: how terrifically complicated it is for men and women to understand one another.

Mostly, the show's creators, Dmitry Lipkin and Colette Burson (The Riches) ignore the moral issues of sex work that Showtime's Secret Diary of a Call Girl had to wrestle with. When the pimp is a woman, and the whore is a man, why bother considering the finer social issues? There's another dick joke to be made!

"I think for a lot of women happiness and great sex are kind of the same thing," Tanya, who refers to her male charge as a "happiness consultant," insightfully observes. Unfortunately, that's the last we hear of that. It's not until the fourth episode that Drecker finally gets it on with a client, and we're left staring at his bare bottom while a woman oggles his hungness. Where's the revelation in that?

Tags: HBO, Hung, men, penis humor, thomas jane

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I was particularly touched by Emily Yoffe's remembrance of Michael Jackson as the young, innocent, and extraordinarily talented boy he once was, before his life went terribly wrong. His childhood played out in public like the lives of kids on reality TV shows, before the concept of reality TV was even fully formed. As a result, his childhood was ruined, and he never got over it. Yet, despite such cautionary tales, parents continue to push their kids in front of the cameras long before the age of consent. Just look at the children of Jon & Kate. Or rather, don't look. Please don't look, and let's starve such shows of their ratings and thereby spare their young stars a similar fate.

That's the tribute I wish we could pay Jackson in his death. Because as it stands, it's already too easy picturing the Gosselin brood all grown up: the plastic surgeries to come, the TV specials of their family "reunions" (complete with vicious sibling rivalries), the "comebacks" for child stars who are famous merely for having always been famous (without even the compensatory joy of having had a genuine talent, as Jackson had in spades). Maybe they'll be lucky. Their fame, after all, is diluted by their numbers. So maybe it won't turn out so ugly for them in the end. Then again, I think we all know: It's unlikely to be pretty.

Tags: Jon & Kate Plus 8, michael jackson death, Reality TV

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A friend told me last night the sort of thing that you only admit when you’re standing in a bar where the entire room is grooving on the 18th song in a marathon of Michael: that recently, for no real reason, he had read through a bunch of the coverage of Michael right after Thriller was released. The general sentiment at the time, he told us, was awe at what Michael’s music did to existing standards of “black” and “white” music. Back then, Billboard had its top-10 mainstream chart, and a separate “Black LPs” chart, and there was little overlap between the two. Michael changed that.

I was less than born when Thriller came out in 1983, so for me, it was strange last night to think of Michael as he once was: someone who raised issues of race not by being some ever-changing hybrid of black and white, but by being black. I remember the occasional Jacko playground chatter, a child-like one-upping of knowledge: “Did you know Michael Jackson used to be black?” It was a sort of truth you came upon while looking through a cousin’s cassette collection or hearing tales from older kids, and wanted to spread, proud of your discovery, as you would your newly gleaned meaning of “second base.” And you said it not fully understanding what those old images of Michael meant about his race now. Was he still black? What happened to him? But, in the manner of recess gossip, you rejected such ambiguities, and described to everyone how dark he was in that album you’d caught a glimpse of that weekend, and everyone ooohed and aaahed at the strange thought.

Despite Michael's drastically changing melanin levels within my lifetime, the racial reflections he raised in the early ’80s are a wonderful tribute to the work he did, and still feel relevant today. This is from a 1984 New York Times article by John Rockwell, headlined “In Pop Music, the Races Remain Far Apart”:

The vast majority of the populace sinks back in upon itself, lazily content with its own traditions and only vaguely aware of more vital, unfamiliar, challenging music just a few notches away on the dial. This applies to blacks as well, who may be missing out on exposure to challenging forms of white music they now don't hear often enough. Black and white music can overlap indistinguishably. But they have divergent stylistic tendencies, and those extremes can grow flaccid or eccentric when they aren't pollinated by the other—when audiences aren't regularly, unself-consciously exposed to styles other than their own.

Ultimately, the racial divisions in music may simply recede, as the listening public and the country as a whole grow more open-minded. If that happens, then maybe Mr. Jackson's success will turn out to have presaged something positive, after all.

Photograph of Jackson at a London concert in 1997 by Dave Hogan/Getty Images.

Tags: michael jackson, Race, thriller