While You Were Sleeping
From Pammy and Liam to Kim Kardash and Anthony Hopkins, it's been a big week for pop culture
Celebrities can be real bastards. Talk amongst yourselves, A-List, and spread the news over a few weeks, not a few days. Where to even start with all the bits that has everyone all cheered up / geed up / hot under the collar this week? Sydney Sweeney’s blue genes jeans? Kim’s mummy bandages for the visage? Liam and Pammy?
If you have no idea what I am talking about then, god bless you, you’ve successfully managed to live a whole life away from The Internet this week and I applaud you. I’d say stop reading immediately and go back to picking your wild flowers, but that would be counter intuitive because OF COURSE I want you here in my corner.
Let’s go Sydney Sweeney.
She posed in her blue jeans for American Eagle denim and according to the Tiktok crazies, sold us a version of eugenics. Now, I am not one to fall about for Sydney – she does have a ridiculously scratchy, slowwwww, sexyyyyy voice in the ad that makes me want to shrivel up and die because why are you selling me lady jeans by another lady in such a porno OnlyFans voice? Surely I am not the market for ASMR perve?
I just want jeans. I don’t need to have the skin flayed from my body by a rubber-stamped S&M diva in a cosy basement dungeon. Muuuust we allllll talk like this now? Watch here. In a slow, drunken, ASMR whisper? To me, this is wildly more offensive than the folks who have decided that American Eagle is promoting eugenics because Sydney’s DNA gave her blue eyes. Also anyone who has tried to wear the scratchy denim-against-the-nips combo that Sydney is sporting, will surely tell you, this is also arguably more offensive. But perhaps this styling harks back to the S&M theme and thus the voice makes sense once more. I am not here to figure out marketing decisions decided in a Mad Men-era boardroom, but 🙄
On marketing decisions gone bananas, Skims launched face shape-wear. You’ll know Skims as the gazillion dollar shape-wear brand co-founded by Kim Kardashian. She is, of course, her own best advertisement and every piece of shape-wear she peddles allows us mere mortals to be suctioned into becoming more like a member of La Famille Kardashian without having to remove any buccal fat or save up for a butt implant.
To give Kim her credit, she has her finger firmly on the pulse and has launched products that you would never have found in shape-wear before… Single leg cycle-shorts? Hell yes, for thigh-high split dresses. Nipple bra? Don’t mind if I do, for boobs that look like they’ve been via the plastic surgeon even when they haven’t. Nipple-pierced bra? Yes, really. She pushes the boundaries. The goods always sell out. And here we are. Sounds like an awful idea, womanhood in tatters, everyone clutching their pearls, but also: shape-wear all sold out.
It’s a chin strap that looks more like the Medieval scold and its purportedly a collagen-infused bandage head wrap that will help lift your jowls and other offending droopy bits while you sleep. Watch here. Considering that you could be adding mouth tape and possibly a nose strip to this (again, thanks Tiktok), one cannot help wonder who exactly you are sleeping next to? Is this for Hannibal Lector-stans or for All The Single Ladies… Who I am assuming now are led to believe that it is simply the pleat of their jowls that has stopped them from having someone to share a bed with… Yoh.
As someone who wore headgear back in 1990 – an embarrassment of riches, I swear – no amount of soft jawline could drag me back to donning this contraption before bed. Do you have any idea what your hair will look like in the morning? I know I should be arguing for the women’s lib of it all, but can we please just start with the bad hair. Also, I know we all want snatched jaws. I have teenage daughters, I hear the word ‘snatched’ almost more often than I hear the word ‘UV’.
Now as for women’s lib. The Tiktokkers are saying that the bandages set us back. Wherever did they get this idea, you might ask? I cant help agreeing that if the message is: when we are sleeping, we still need to be trying to improve ourselves, the movement has probs gone too far.
I’d love a collagen- infused bandage to work as much as the next middle-aged women who’s lost her elasticity, but let’s be fair on the bandages, girls, how’re they supposed to work miracles? The only snatching I’m doing in my sleep is an actual kidnapping. And honestly, who would bother?
The tech is based on the plastic surgery pressure bandages that facelift patients have to keep in place for the first few days after their procedure, so I get the cosmetic angle and I think its bloody genius too. Why not have us wrap up our heads to slim us down and tighten us up. But this works with a facelift because we’re swollen as all fork. Not sure the same wild results will be applicable. Again, unlikely to try because: claustrophobic, married, DGAF. And care more about my hair than my chinny chin chin.
One last thing though - Kim and the Skims crew know what they are doing and I have a major girl crush on their chief product officer Emma Grede (listen to her biz podcast, its brilliant!) and she’s fiesty and British so fun to listen to. Anyway, I digress. Skims are forking good at nailing the market appetite for new product so this shaping scold will be a zinger. Despite what anyone has to say to the contrary. I am however exhausted at the mere idea.
Onto more fun things and someone who would definitely definitely be exhausted by this idea: the one and only Pamela Anderson. She’s another one I can safely say I have a major girl crush on - post-doccie Pammy is just my best. She’s out there living her life, zero forks given, having fun, being adorable, not slapping on the make-up, thinking everyone’s going to ignore her, then everyone actually goes bananas, repeat. She’s in the new reboot of Naked Gun. It also stars Liam Neeson.
Liam and Pammy (if all reports and body language and chemistry and affection are to be believed - aka your own eyes) are dating. If that isn’t the cutest couple since Meryl Streep and Martin Short got together on the set of Only Murders In The Building, then you have given up on love and there is no hope for you! Also I have read more than my fair share of romances over the decades to tell you that Brooding, Gruff Widower meets Perky, No-forks-given Former Bombshell is the Grumpy-Sunshine trope we all collectively swoon for… So here we are!
Pam and Liam are cute as buttons. Sydney’s lost her voice, but found her genes and Kim is laughing smiling smizing all the way to the bank! What have you all been up to, under achievers?!