The Science Behind the Cow

I was browsing over at Nurse Myra’s this morning and on following one of her links discovered a sterling example of one of my all-time pet peeves: The Meaningless Scientific Diagram.

I’m sure you know the kind of thing – you’ve almost certainly seen it in those TV commercials for washing powder where a personage in white coat is telling you all about the ‘scientific’ basis for how the stuff gets your shirts whiter than white. Sooner or later, up comes a graphical ‘explanation’ of the virtues of the product. It usually involves arrows, a dumb, proprietary, vaguely scientific name like HydroLux or OxyFizz, and a formula.

And it always means absolutely nothing.

In this particular case it was a website for a product from ‘St Herb’ called Nano Breast Cream. Don’t panic ladies – it’s not a cream for causing your endowments to shrink to sub-molecular size, but in fact uses the miracle of nanoparticles to do exactly the opposite! Aside from ‘protecting your breasts from free radicals and visible cleavage*’ it enhances your bust from 1 to 3 cup sizes! Marvellous!

And this is how it works:

A Daft Diagram

I don’t know about you, but one look at that diagram and I’m entirely confused convinced!

Elsewhere on the wonderful St Herb‡ site there is some explanation of the difference between liposomes and nanosomes with further visual aids:

LipoBreasts NanoBreasts

I like this kind of diagram much better than the earlier one. I don’t know what the heck it’s saying about lipo or nano anything, but it is a striking endorsement of visible cleavage.

For a particularly good laugh, take a look at the instructions for how to apply Nano Breast Cream. Pay special attention to Frame 1 – I think she has a volunteer to help with the experiment!

Girls, I’m willing to wager that once you find yourself in the situation of having a friend towel your breasts dry, the issue of size is merely academic. I probably don’t need to draw you a diagram.

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*These are very puzzling claims. I don’t know of any research that indicates that free radicals are a detriment to breasts. Maybe they mean the kind of radicals that you get in university pubs? They can be a bit free and grabby after a few drinks. And then there’s the visible cleavage problem. Now correct me if I’m wrong, but I was under the impression that some girls actually go out of their way to create visible cleavage.

‡St Herb. Ahhhh. Doesn’t that name just fill you with reassuring friendly naturalness! Either that or it conjures up an image of dirty old man called Herbert who is thinking anything but saintly thoughts about massaging women’s chests.

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