Cottonelle perverts

This blog is not my fault. There you’ve been warned.

I have been forced by the marketing people at Cottonelle to add ‘Refresh’ to my list of words that are nauseating and unacceptable for public use. The list includes moist, beverage, milky, cuddle and towelette. Some sick individual decided to create the ‘Cottonelle Refresh Lounge’ at SXSW to promote their bottom wiping products. I actually walked past this vile place while on my way to work at an event and didn’t realize that the call to come and ‘relax, refresh and recharge’ was in fact a way for the Cottonelle people to get their fingers all over you. Yes, not only pushing their nasty moistened products but using their poo fingers to shine your shoes, touch up your make-up, blow dry your hair and who knows what else.

But the fun doesn’t end there, not when there’s this hilarious hashtag #letstalkbums. Cottonelle hired some British bint for a serious of ads where she accosts Americans about their ‘bathroom’ habits. I hope Cottonelle paid her a lot more than the UK production company did for her outstanding series on Britain’s Favourite Supermarket Foods. Not that any supermarket will ever want her poo-stained image walking its produce aisles again after this. You are forever soiled and even if you end up doing some sort of period piece (historical not tampon) I will still triumphantly call out to the television ‘oh look it’s the stinky finger poo woman’.

And the hashtag doesn’t really work for me anyway. I’m not very good at figuring out conjoined words at the best of times and every time I look at your hashtag Cottonelle, I see #let stalk bums.  I don’t know what stalk bums are, but visually I’m picturing celery sticking out of a cartoon bum. I’ll see if I can get Erik to draw it. Even better he could animate it. Brilliant, it’ll be like the sweet little depression in the Abilify ad. I am a branding genius – everyone’s going to be talking about the cute Stalk Bum.

I suppose the whole point of using the word ‘bum’ is to make it sound a bit more jolly and fun, because who wants to be serious when they’re having a poo. Plus calling it the fanny lounge would be a terrible idea when there’s a lot of Brits in town, all of them desperate for the chance of a quick morning-after-douche.

Of course the one thing that the Cottonelle Refresh Lounge does not have is poo stations, aka toilets. When in need, I think that actually being able to sit down and have a poo would be more refreshing than having my hair blow-dried but perhaps I’m just fooling myself. And even if I were not in need, I suspect that having an anal massage on the white sofas with lavender-scented Lysol wafting in the air might be enough to set things off. But if you really want some bum loving hands all over your clean clothes, hair, make-up then go right ahead. But we saw you go in there and we will remember. The final word on this goes to Erik who pointed out in a text message to me yesterday that a far clearer hashtag for this whole disgusting enterprise would have been Cottonelle: #itgetstheshitoff.