One of the days on the cruise ship we docked in Nassau, the Bahamas. Our enormous boat pulled up to an enormous pier and we walked off to do some duty-free shopping. There’s a strip of shops very close to the pier where it turns out one can save maybe a couple hundred bucks on the two-thousand-dollar watch you’ve been eying. Or, you can get a keychain that says “The Bahamas.” There are fancy, crazy expensive shops mixed with cheap souvenir stores along the shopping street. I was walking with purpose to the store selling bamboo sheets, so missed the interaction where Bob’s mom Jane was given a moisturizer sample and the salesman applied a skin tightener under one eye. They caught up to me and were waiting outside the sheet store as I talked myself out of buying these particular (expensive) sheets. On the sidewalk, Jane pulled off her sunglasses and asked if we noticed a difference between her two eyes.
Holy shit, it was incredible. I’m not kidding, the difference was amazing. We were celebrating Jane’s 80th birthday, but she’s beautiful, she looks terrific and not a day over sixty at her worst. This magical serum had further turned back time. Bob, the eternal skeptic, was so impressed he thought we should return to the cosmetics store immediately to learn more about this voodoo juice.
The gorgeous, bronzed Israeli salesman, Isaac or Izak or Itzak or it doesn’t matter demonstrated the application of the skin tightener to Jane’s other eye, and we all watched with amazement as the wrinkles disappeared.
He turned his attention to me. “Would you like to try it? Not like you need it. You are, I would guess, 32?” Well, hello, Isaac. If you want me to be 32, I’m 32. I sat down in the salon chair so he could make meaningful eye contact as he smeared some liquid under my eye.
“That is your husband?” he asked, nodding toward Bob, who was scrolling through his phone. “Him?” I responded. “I guess.”
I could feel the area under my eye getting tight. I was handed a mirror and Bob was called over.
“Oh my god. Your eye isn’t puffy any more,” Bob said. Genuine amazement.
One bottle of this youth fountain regularly sells for $750. That’s fucking ridiculous, but Jesus, look at the results. It almost seemed worth it. The price quickly came down to much fewer hundreds, with a second bottle thrown in. As someone who is pretty confident about her skin BUT just had her breasts removed, this was sounding reasonable. Jane and I could split the order. The fact that Bob was entirely on board was, frankly, shocking. He gallantly decided to gift one bottle to his mother, and, well, for his beautiful wife, no price too great. With this treatment, he could pretend I was in my 20s or 30s. Okay, early-to-mid 40s. Winners all around.
Now that we’d tipped our sucker hand, Isaac served us champagne and called out their special technician to show Jane some of their other products. I still had the treatment on only one eye, so I was half mid-40s (maybe younger) and half puffy stroke face. Bob and his brother wandered off, and I watched as a new potion was applied to half of Jane’s face. What the new, less hot and less charming technician was selling was an infrared wand and set of three products that were guaranteed to take 10 years off, maybe 20, all for the incredible price of seven fucking thousand, five hundred dollars. Yeah, sure. That’s not happening.
When I started glancing around the store to see where hot Isaac went, the mean new guy asked why I wasn’t paying attention. I said I wanted to have my other eye treated, so I maybe didn’t look like I had a blood clot in my brain. He said he’d do it, when he was done with Jane. But I wanted Isaac to do it!!
The presentation was starting to fall apart, and he was doing the hard sell, to the point of making Jane feel bad about not taking advantage of this amazing offer, even when he was able to text his manager and get the price down to a measly $2,500. This whole time, he’s left a white skin cream covering half of Jane’s face, ensuring she wouldn’t just walk out. Amazing sales tactic. I started thinking I’d need to create a diversion, so Bob and his brother Mike could swoop in and rescue Jane and we could get back on the huge boat.
Eventually he finished up, and we left with our overpriced but apparently effective skin tightening serums we bought at the beginning. I believe a key ingredient is Super Glue. I have very sensitive skin, and I was a happily surprised to wake up the next day with my eyeballs still in my head and vision intact.
Jane called yesterday to ask if I’d tried the bottle I brought home. Not yet. She tried hers, and thinks we were scammed. (No!) She doesn’t think it is the same product we sampled in the store. It still seems to do something, but just doesn’t feel the same. I think it’s probably just more effective when a hottie foreigner is applying it, rubbing his hands on my face, staring deep into my eyes. Were we hoodwinked? Maybe. Was it worth it? Probably.