The Perfect V is far from perfect for womankind
Danish company coming to Canada with product to make, um, that female body part glow
Hey, guess what?
This week our reality show of a life took a dark turn toward “The Hunger Games” territory, when a company out of Denmark made their vagina highlighter available worldwide.
Yep, that’s what I said. You can now buy highlighter for your vajayjay. Or at least you’ll be able to, come Thursday, when The Perfect V’s products become available to the world outside Scandinavia.
What is this company and what is this product and why are they doing this to us? All good questions. Well, while they don’t overtly use the words “vagina” or “vulva” in any of their messaging (are these words too vulgar? Is a natural looking vulva also too vulgar?), The Perfect V does claim to create products for the V like creams, serums, exfoliators and even a mist. A mist!
“The V is that pretty little triangle sometimes neat, at other times unruly, but always perfect and unique in its own personal way. In fact, just like an iconic haircut, how you style your ‘V’ can be a clue to a particular moment in fashion,” reads the website.
So what is it? No, it’s not highlighting hair dye for down there. But you know that highlighter makeup the Kardashian clan has made so popular? The stuff their disciples (and others) use as face contour to make parts of it glow and shine? Yeah, that.
Well, the Kardashians must be kicking themselves in their cans for not thinking of this first. Because The Perfect V also boasts the Very V Luminizer, a product that will essentially make your vagina glow.
According to the website, the Luminizer does the following:
“Luminous iridescent colour to add some extra prettiness to the V
•Renews and improves the skin, making it appear more youthful and fresh
•Brightens and minimizes the appearance of skin imperfections
•Quick to dry, leaving a luminous glow to the skin”
I wasn’t aware that I was supposed to be keeping my vagina up with the current fashions or trying to minimize its imperfections, but I guess I can thank The Perfect V for “illuminating” me on this subject while simultaneously shaming me for having a frumpy vajayjay. Because, as most of the reactions on social media point out, as if women weren’t already under enough pressure to look/act/feel perfect in what we wear, in how we present ourselves, in how we behave, now we have to worry about having a “youthful and fresh” V, too?
So, yes, reactions on social media appeared to condemn the Very V Luminizer. And I have yet to read a positive critique of the product, basically for the reasons I just mentioned.
But here’s the thing: this company, founded and run by Avonda Nelson Urben, a former marketing executive for Revlon and L’Oréal, created it. Which means someone is buying it. So it got me thinking about who is buying this product and how it’s different from, say, a lightning-bolt-shaped bikini wax or bejewelled bikini area (remember when that was all the rage?). Because essentially all of these are means of prettying up the V, right? But the lightning bolt, the plethora of versions of the Brazilian bikini wax, even the bedazzling … all of that is just for fun and just for us. But a highlighting cream that makes us appear more youthful?
That’s not for us — that’s another layer of societal pressure to be perfect. The company is called The Perfect V, for God’s sake. But then again, it’s run by a person who previously worked for companies that exist to make us feel insecure, then turn around and sell us solutions to make us less insecure.
Ok, so can we all agree that “perfect” doesn’t exist? Life is not an episode of “Say Yes to the Dress.” (I was forced to watch an episode last week.) If social media has taught us anything, it’s that it’s very easy to pretend to have a “perfect” life, in the sense that everyone in it is always blissed out.
If you omit the conflict, boredom, stress, anxiety of life from your posts, sure, it’ll seem as if none of those negatives have touched you at all. Life shouldn’t be perfect and neither should the appearance of your vagina.
So let’s leave the vagina highlighter out, OK? Enough. Just, enough.