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| Actual Facebook ad I got yesterday. |
There were plenty of top 10 year-end 2022 countdowns, but they all start to run together for me: biggest news stories, most famous people who died, songs, etc. What you didn’t get, and am sure have been dying to know, is what kind of Facebook advertisements I got this year. Bonus points if you can pick what I actually bought from them!
Anyone on Facebook knows that its advertising is creepy as hell. This past summer I plunked a few keys on a piano. I did not Google pianos. I didn’t even say the word “piano.” Then bam, a few hours later, I get an ad for pianos. A couple months after that I went into an alterations shop that also sells police uniforms. Later that day: ads for police uniforms and tactical equipment. All those paranoid folks worried about big brother are carrying him around with them all the time on their phones. Luckily, my life is so boring, I’m not particularly concerned about it. (“Oooh, she went to work again!”)
Sometimes, Facebook ads nailed me in embarrassing ways. Other times, um, not so much. There are two of the things listed below I actually bought after the ads. See if you can guess which. I’ll put them at the end.
10. Bomb-sniffing rat adoption
Apparently you can train rats to sniff out bombs. Facebook keeps asking me to adopt some. I assume in the donate-to-the-nonprofit-that-uses-them way and not actually take them home. Because #1, I don’t have hidden bombs in or around my house that I’m aware of; #2, my husband thinks rats are gross because of their hairless tails (I think they’re adorable) and #3, I’m not sure how my elderly cats would feel about them.
9. Trite think pieces from The Atlantic
“Why making friends in midlife is so hard.” “The opposite of toxic positivity.” “There’s no way to repair marriage without repairing men.” “Stop fetishizing old homes.”
Those are all clickbait headlines The Atlantic Magazine tried to sell me on this week on Facebook. I don’t have time to read 3,000 words from someone whose relationship track record is probably worse than mine.
8. Bras for small-breasted women.
Fine, you figured me out, Facebook. But I will never buy bras with seams on the cups, regardless of whether they were specially designed for the itty bitty titty committee. That chafing on delicate parts is unacceptable.
7. A $400 zit zapper
It’s technology developed by NASA! Or something. You hold the thing with a blue light on your zit for 90 seconds, then the red light for 90 seconds, and your zit magically disappears! Maybe.
6. CC creams
Facebook must have figured out that I don’t love my skin and has been relentlessly trying to sell me stuff to cover it up. Don’t skin-shame me, Facebook! Does the body-positivity movement include loving your sun damage spots?
5. Modest swimwear
I’ve never been a string bikini kind of girl, but I also don’t practice Islam. Yet over the summer, i got daily ads for swimsuits featuring full-length skirts over leggings and tops with attached head coverings. Do I own a long-sleeved swim shirt? I do. But for sun protection purposes, not because I might tempt a man with my shoulder blades.
4. Cat hair scraper
Thankfully, I got this ad more often than the one that’s a sort-of brush you hold in your mouth so you can pretend to lick your cat. The hair scraper ad shows it miraculously pulling entire cats’ worth of hair off your rugs and furniture with zero effort.
3. PMS gummies
Gummy vitamins designed with the premenstrual bitch in mind in a variety of yummy fruit flavors! You can tell a man came up with these, because if a woman had designed PMS vitamins, they would obviously be chocolate.
2. Hair removal scrubby pad thing
These ads show women with disgustingly long armpit, leg and even toe hair. I can’t even. Then they rub some pad on them and the hair magically and painlessly disappears! If there’s anything I learned from the Epilady in the late 1990s, body hair never “disappears” painlessly.
1. Period panties
This is apparently underwear you just free bleed into. I’m honestly both intrigued and grossed out. You can also get them as leggings. That you just wear around. With uterine blood in them. At the grocery store or something. No.
So in 2022, Facebook had me pegged as a modest, hairy, cat-owning, small-boobed woman of child-bearing age with bad skin and relationship concerns who isn’t concerned if rats get exploded. Can't wait to see what they think of me in 2023!
* Quiz answers! Can you guess which of the products above I actually purchased after seeing the Facebook ads?
Drumroll please: No. 7, the $400 zit zapper (the results of which I am not so far impressed) and No. 4, the cat hair scraper (works great on short-piled rugs, snags on most everything else).
