I am obsessed with these two ads (Interconnected)
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I am obsessed with these two ads
17.28, Friday 19 Jun 2026
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I didn’t know what a near-infrared LED mask was a week ago, and now I am obsessed with this ad from Omnilux.
Because there’s a lot going on.
The aesthetic of the mask itself is wild: the lines look like sinews as if the woman has been flensed
But the schematic flesh is commercial! The logo on the forehead!
Yet she has glossy hair and a spa outfit
And is drinking a glass of white wine??
Let’s not get into the red glow through the holes in the face
The ad copy is tight af, no messing around: retail, popularity, timely, professional, boom boom boom.
Your best skin awaits
I have questions about the very concept of an LED mask (can’t you go outside? but now we’ve internalised a fear of the sky because of UV?) but that’s not my point.
These components don’t work together. Health and beauty vs the evil red glow. You can’t sip the wine through that mask.
So there’s no singular integrated vibe here. It’s the opposite of vibe. It’s a set of hieroglyphs. Six symbols collaged together into the same image.
Similarly the vacuum guy James Dyson is now growing strawberries and the copy is wild.
AI-powered British strawberries
I mean let’s unpack that just for a second…
“AI” is high tech future-y but also people are trained into not asking questions about it, just that it must be great because trillion dollar companies are here
“British” has a surface of local product but in a Dyson context is elbows-out national pride, pro-Brexit style (as he is, even though he moved production to Singapore)
“Strawberries” as in strawberries and cream and Wimbledon.
Let’s not get into the photo in which we are reassured about the quality of the strawberries not because they are being nurtured by a friendly farmhand – but because they are being CCTV monitored? Like: AI-powered panoptic strawberry surveillance will scare the strawbs into being plump and red, Jeremy Bentham’s paranoia-based fruit production?
The very next section is titled British strawberries: 100% of your daily vitamin C which is a whiplash into health.
At this point I don’t feel like I’m reading. I feel like these ads are laser-targeted streams of signifiers treating my psyche as a combination lock to be picked.
The fact that the grab-bag of symbols appears to have meaning on a human level (a photo of a woman; strawberries growing) is almost an accident. But there’s no content there beyond that.
Umberto Eco, semiotician, would have been able to write 2,000 words unfolding that Omnilux advert into its constituent symbols and deducing the shape of society from its very existence.
Peak semiotics was probably, what, the 1970s? We need that expertise to dismantle communication once again.
Anyway this is what it must feel like to computers when they get hacked. Like by a text message with a weird collection of characters that buffer overflows and takes over the app executable.
When AI gets really good - probably not much better than today - it will be able to automate the process of discovering the four or five symbols that unlock the “I must buy that” response, and then it’ll wrap it in a jpeg and put it on a billboard.
And next thing you know you walk by a photo of a woman drinking wine and it’s a jumble of symbols and you’ve been jailbroken and the compulsion to try an LED mask is so potent because well, I wonder what near-infrared feels like on the skin and what was that Omnilux you say? and without really thinking your phone is in your hand and
Auto-calculated kinda related posts:
Viscerally and deliberately unsettling product design<br>(14 Jan 2021)
An Ariston TV spot from the early 1990s<br>(23 Oct 2020)
The Prompt Whisperer<br>(4 Aug 2022)
If you enjoyed this post, please consider sharing it by email or on social media. Here’s the link. Thanks, —Matt.