*#@!$ Swiss.
From Cracked:
People are slapping gold on anything these days: playing cards, Reddit accounts, cyborg cells that cure cancer. But not everything improves with gold. "Gilding the lily" means to unnecessarily attempt to improve something that's great the way it is, perhaps even ruining it in the process. It's also a sex act we won't discuss here, but to pull it off, you need three rubber gloves, a sousaphone, a lunar eclipse, an oil with a high smoke point, and the tears of a jilted bride.
Now let's look at some gilded gewgaws that really are Midas-touched in the head.
#5. Your Face
You know the difference between a satirist and a millionaire? A satirist only writes about their horrible ideas. If I enacted every funny innovation that would require me to lose faith in humanity or myself, I'd be rich in a week, and dead by my own hand the week after, because I'd made my fortune selling Rapid Ramen Cookers.
rapidramen.com, Pani_Ayanna/iStock/Getty Images
Caution: Gold tray not safe for microwave.
Here's another one of those times reality elbowed in on the satire racket with its old friend the placebo effect. Not content with smearing every food on the planet into your skin and hair, cosmetics makers have realized they can scatter a few flakes of gold into cream and raise the price like it's the colloidal version of your dreams.
The result is gold moisturizer, which claims to rejuvenate skin -- and does! But not because of gold, obviously.
How It Gilds the Lily:
There are big benefits to keeping your skin moisturized, not the least of which is that you might attract the attention of high-profile serial killers who can make you famous. But gold will not help with that.
The New York Times already called bullshit on gold facial care, but let's boil it down: gold will not keep you from decaying, because you are not a robot. Not flakes of gold, not a gold mask, not gold nano-particles, unless that mole on your face is cancerous -- but if you have access to nanotech treatments, we assume you also have scientists who can explain why magic doesn't work.
Here, I've annotated a passage to better illustrate for you.
New York TimesNever trust someone who can't even spell her own name correctly.
The only substance she's scientifically qualified to discuss is bullshit. You'd get a more chemically accurate description of gold from back issues of Metal Men.
DC ComicsAt least the phony science there comes from things robots can't do, not gold.
Gold even beat out The Backstreet Boys for 2001's allergen of the year. So a select few who have never rubbed gold into their skin are going to discover an ugly reaction. Everyone else's ugly reaction is limited to realizing they paid premium for an inactive ingredient. The Lily Meter says:
Medioimages/Photodisc/Photodisc/Getty Images
Putting gold in rejuvenating creams is like trying to build a skate park out of chocolate pudding. Almost nobody gets hurt, but you've wasted something great on a function it can never fulfill.
#4. Staples They're just staples, but golden. They can't pierce deeper than the regular kind. Leprechauns won't trade you one for a wish. And they're not inscribed with runes that reveal the secret location of the Orc King's treasure (which is also gold staples).
ooms.nlDarling, will you collate documents with me for the rest of our lives?
Now, there are plenty of things dipped in gold that don't need to be -- Rolexes, Zippos, James Bond's lovers -- usually for thousands more than it would cost to have done it yourself. Hell, you can even get a gold vibrator that says "Fuck Design" if you really want to pay $375 for a pun and an orgasm. (But, girl, I would give you one of those two for free, and throw in the other for $200, and good luck guessing which is which.)
We're not talking about any of those. A gold vibrator still has a purpose, even if it never fucks design. Tacky gold plating at least serves the function of motivating people to fling sex at unattractive rich folks. But those things all function more or less the same. The staples are less effective thanks to the gold.
How It Gilds the Lily:...MORE
Designers Guido Ooms and Karin van Lieshout (don't let the names fool you; they're not douchebags, just Dutch) suggest these staples be used "primarily as a form of jewelry" and that they "can be applied to clothing." (Back it up; they might be douches after all.)
First, a designer should know that no fashion benefits from staples. Stapling clothes together is the retreat of the impoverished and insane, or in the case of Internet comedy writers: both, and I still wouldn't wear this. Right now I'm clad in leather slippers and khakis with a torn crotch, and I am telling you that stapling them would make me look too much like a homeless person....
...We're going to want a new form of money that's intrinsically valuable.
Enter PaperGold, the "dollar-sized bill with all the purity of a gold bar." It contains one-tenth of a gram of laminated 24-carat gold and looks like American money as imagined by people who don't have plumbing.
