Have you ever stood in front of your closet, eyeing your wardrobe with dismay because you simply have nothing to wear?  Have you ever thought your clothes were just too drab, too plain, too boring?  Well, then Way Back Wednesday has a solution for you!  If you suffer from a shortage of blinginess, then jump into the Seen On TV Express Time Machine, and travel with us back to the 1980′s, when hair was big and sweatshirts were sparkly.

That’s right–this week, we’re talking about none other than the BeDazzler.  Now, don’t get me wrong.  The BeDazzler is still available today, and it really is a good way to inexpensively recreate some of today’s fashions.  Instead of paying upwards of $200 for designer embellished jeans, or dropping a small fortune on a sparkly “Princess” t-shirt, you can use the BeDazzler to create your own custom style.  This infomercial product is one that has actually stood the test of time.  In fact, the BeDazzler was first sold through direct marketing in the 1970s, and it was voted one of the “Top 100 Gadgets” by Mobile PC Magazine in 2005.

While the product may still be alive and kickin’, the 1980′s infomercial marketing the wardrobe enhancer deserves a proper burial:

“Don’t be dull, be dazzling!”

Now that I know how to cover an entire blazer in rhinestones and silver studs, I just need to find a product that will allow me to quickly and easily create that perfect side ponytail.

I’ll admit that I’m pretty much a klutz, and if there is a way to mess something up, I’ll find it and expand on it, creating a glorious fiasco of the simplest task.  However, even I can manage to accomplish many of the tasks deemed so completely difficult and virtually impossible by television infomercials.  The marketing of many seen on TV products relies heavily on the concept of making a difficult task easy.  After all, who knew a traditional blanket was such an unwieldy contraption until the invention of the Snuggie?  (As someone who smugly mocked the Snuggie when it first came out, I became a devoted fan during a blizzard last winter.  I could hold a baby and keep myself bundled up without smothering us both.)

As I was researching this week’s Way Back Wednesday blog post, I came across the following video, a “Tribute to Doing it Wrong.”  This video takes several of the many examples of How to Screw Up Simple Tasks demonstrated in television infomercials, and sets the montage to the classic Beatles tune “Help.”  Fitting, no?

It just kind of makes me feel warm inside to see people who are so much better than I am at failing royally.  Walking?  Too hard!  Using a blanket?  Impossible!  Pouring milk?  Never!

Thank goodness for products which make our lives so much easier and take the fail out of surviving another day full of obstacles and hazards.

Last week, we at SeenOnTV Express reminisced about the perplexing little contraption known as the FlowBee:  half vacuum, half haircutting device, and 100% confusion.  However, the FlowBee is not the only infomercial product designed to style your hair in the most mystifying of ways.  Today we look at another bizarre product designed to give you the hair you have always dreamed of–if, that is, you have always dreamed of spray painting your head.

GLH (which stands for “Good Looking Hair,” of course) is a “hair spray paint” designed to cover bald spots and thinning hair.  GLH is made up of spray paint and fibers that “mimic real hair follicles.”  Despite being featured on Way Back Wednesday, GLH is still available; however, it earns  its spot in our retrospective due to its early infomercial beginnings when it was hawked in the early 90′s by Ron Popeil, legendary inventor, pitchman, and founder or Ronco, one of the leading companies in as seen on TV marketing.  Popeil was awarded the “Ig Nobel Prize” in Consumer Engineering in 1993.  The awards were originally given to “discoveries that cannot, or should not, be reproduced,” but the intent was later revised to reward 10 achievements that “”first make people laugh, and then make them think.”  The Ig Nobel Prize committe, which includes scientists and Nobel Laureates, described Popeil as the ”incessant inventor and perpetual pitchman of late night television,” and said his inventions redefined the Industrial Revolution.

In the following video, Ron Popeil is seen promoting the Ronco product GLH.  In this video, he actually spray paints his own head.  Without laughing.  Theoretically, GLH provides the illusion of actual growing hair rather than a vast expanse of baldness.  To me it looks like–well–a spray painted bald spot.  Judge for yourself:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSEDyOAGS4E&feature=related

Lest we mock hair-in-a-can too much, lets keep in mind that GLH is one of many products designed to give the illusion of thicker hair by camouflaging the scalp.  The ubiquitous Joan Rivers has a new product called Great Hair Day.  Great Hair Day is a powder, not a spray like GLH, and it is applied in a much more subtle manner, using an applicator brush rather than an ozone-eating aerosol can.  Once again, infomercial evolution has managed to refine one of its more befuddling products. 

Unless, of course, you prefer to graffiti your own head.

This week’s post was inspired by my flat iron.  Whenever I leave the salon, my hair is smooth and shiny, but when I try to duplicate the results at home, my hair snags on the straightener and just looks fuzzy.  I’ve decided that I need to get a new straightener, and I’m trying to decide between the InStyler and the Paris Hilton Celebrity Styler.  Mulling my possibilities, I started to think about hairdos of the past, when I wanted anything but straight hair.  Frizzy perms, big bangs . . . ah, the mall hair of the 80′s.

And hair of the 80′s is what brings me to the topic of today’s post.  How could I possibly consider Way Back Wednesday to be an in-depth expose of popular infomercial products of the past without dredging up the FlowBee?

The FlowBee was the vacuum-slash-haircutting tool that people all across the nation were snatching up in order to give really bad haircuts to defenseless children.  The FlowBee was first seen on TV infomercials in 1988, and it was hawked by its creator, Rick Hunt.   Hunt was a carpenter who thought that there had to be a good way to get the sawdust out of his hair . . . and give himself a haircut at the same time.  Thus, the FlowBee was born.

Hunt took his invention to the television airwaves and launched a home-styling phenomenon.  How could the FlowBee fail to be successful when it was marketed with such lines as, “I’m a carpenter.  I’m not a hairdresser,” and the oh-so-convincing line, “As you can see, it’s a pretty good haircut for one I did on myself.”

That’s right.  It’s not just “pretty good.”  It’s pretty good for a haircut that a carpenter with no experience or training as a stylist gave himself.

Doesn’t that just make you want to rush right out and buy one?

But wait.  There’s more.

The FlowBee wasn’t just a motorized haircutting apparatus with spinning blades. The blades were actually attached to a vacuum hose.  With its rotating blades and vacuum hose, the FlowBee was one infomercial product that really . . . um . . . sucked.  No more difficult, unweildy broom to help you sweep up the remnants of your home-haircut.  The FlowBee just whisked all that mangled hair right down the hose, getting rid of all the evidence of your do-it-yourself ‘do.

Well.  Not all the evidence.  You still had to walk around in public with your FlowBee haircut.  But hey–it’s pretty good for a haircut you did yourself.