I don't know about you, but I hate being manipulated. It feels rotten to find out that someone has preyed upon my deepest insecurities to get me to do something I otherwise wouldn't. It happens to women all the time -- like in your favorite store's dressing room. Yup, apparel shops know exactly where to get us. They're using this one sneaky trick to get us to pull out our wallets.
They're using "skinny mirrors."
You know what I'm talking about because they're an open secret. One Oklahoma television news crew sent a secret shopper to a mall and found slimming mirrors all over the place -- mirrors either bent slightly or placed a bit higher to make the shopper look slimmer. We all know they're there, and yet they WORK. According to one study, 88 percent of shoppers at a lingerie store made purchases when they stood in front of a slimming mirror compared with 73 percent who looked into regular mirrors.
Many of these mirrors come from the Skinny Mirror Company, currently in talks with a "popular apparel chain" and charmingly offensive in a pretty transparent way.
Skinny Mirror's Facebook page describes the company as "personal coaching" -- a mirror company. The page is filled with all kinds of body positive malarkey about how they make women feel more confident about themselves. And it just makes me sad.
I was willing to accept skinny mirrors in dressing rooms as just a fact of modern life. The point of the store is to get you to BUY, and who can blame them for using every tool at their disposal? It's the idea that a mirror that tricks you into looking slimmer is supposed to also build your self-confidence, that we're that feeble-minded and superficial, and that we'd buy the idea of mirrors having some sort of higher calling in life that I find icky.
Ladies, we all know where true self-confidence comes from, right? Say it with me now: FROM WITHIN.
Ugh, mirror company pretending to save the world, one woman at a time. We may go along with your silly carnival tricks, but you are NOT my personal coach.
How do you feel about so-called skinny mirrors in dressing rooms?
Image © Kris Ubach and Quim Roser/cultura/Corbis