Beauty Dish

Review: Avon Anew Clinical Deep Crease Concentrate

Look Stunning, Not Stunned! That's the tag line for the new television campaign featuring Avon's latest product in the Anew Clinical line, the Deep Crease Concentrate, to debut in Campaign 22. I saw this advertisement during the Avon Home for the Holidays conference. It will soon grace your flickering screen. The camera follows a chic young woman in short hair as she knocks on ceramic mannequin faces, an impish grin on her unlined face. A soothing voice tells you that this product relaxes and erases your deep facial lines without losing those crazy unique smiling elements that scream "You!" This product is Avon's answer to the Botox craze, and it contains a compound extracted from a jungle herb which allegedly fills in the cracks of your face, relaxing them into a youthful, yet still elastic, state.

I don't know if I was exhausted and punchy from the Avon conference, or if Avon is just getting silly, but the commercial seemed patently ridiculous. Here was a woman - she couldn't be a day over 25 - prancing around knocking on mannequins. I mean, really. If they took a bohemian buxom beauty of 38 with four children, like myself, and pranced me around those mannequins, and if I looked half that good, well then! Sign me the heck up!

The paper literature promoting this product is just as lurid. Two treatments in one drop! Relaxes AND fills! Targets the length, depth, and number of deep, stubborn creases around your eyes, forehead and mouth! Contains Bo-Hylurox!

Of course, this product must be tested under real life conditions. Thanks to Avon my skin care regimen nows utilizes no fewer than twelve products, so I wanted to use someone who is a soap and water man, someone with a nice, big, identifiable crease. I coerced my Turkish friend to be my very first Deep Crease Guinea Pig. He sports a pair of lovely deep creases between his bushy eyebrows, each of them a good half inch in length and maybe half as deep. When the Turk's brows furrow together in anger, the creases turns into icy crevices as uncharted as the far side of K2.

The Anew Clinical Deep Crease Concentrate bottle is white and glassy, heavy to the touch, dermatologist-like, in the professional expensive manner of the rest of the Clinical line. The top consists of an eyedropper with a bright white bulbous stopper rimmed in cool silver. This product will cost a cool thirty-two American dollars. Pricey! I received a gift bottle at the Home for the Holidays event, so I called Mr. Bushy Mountain Eyebrows and we went to work.

The instructions tell you to use one drop of the concentrate per creviced area, morning and night. You smooth upward and outward until the liquid is absorbed. The liquid is surprisingly yellow - a byproduct of the special herb - and feels viscous and slippery, and I hate to make this comparison, but I have to be honest here: It feels just like nose mucous.

My Turkish friend took the bottle and swore up and down he would apply it faithfully, day and night. I took a before photograph and an after photograph, three weeks later. You can see the photographs for yourself and determine whether his creases have decreased. In my opinion as a beauty consultant, the product did somewhat fill in and relax my Turkish friend's forehead creases. However, I do not feel it is a significant amount.

Here are his thoughts, verbatim, on the whole shenanigans:

"I don't like the smell. It feels greasy, too."

"It does not rub in easily."

"It almost makes your forehead feel asleep, like when your hand falls asleep."

"I can't see a huge difference, but I do see a little bit of a change."

"This costs $32 bucks??? No way would I buy it!"

Maybe a female test subject would have been a better idea.