Haunting Halloween Masks Depict The Horror Of Smokers' Ruined Faces
Rubber masks with rotten yellow teeth, a hole in the trachea, and gangrenous skin: What looks like a publicity stunt for The Walking Dead is actually an anti-smoking initiative created just in time for Halloween. British online clinic HealthExpress partnered with prostheses experts to make Halloween masks based on smokers’ ruined faces for their “Stoptober” campaign.
Actors wearing medical fright masks--afflicted with diseases like mouth and throat cancers, macular degeneration, and periodontal disease--have been deployed across the U.K. this month in cities known to have high smoking populations. They're wandering the streets, turning heads, and handing out anti-smoking pamphlets.
As we all learned from Mad Men, big bad tobacco companies love to use graphic design and advertising strategies to lure new smokers. One minute you're wondering how Joe Camel manages to make being a dromedary look cool, and the next you're eagerly filling Philip Morris pockets. Working the tactic in reverse, the new campaign reveals the tragedy of the Virginia Slims model after years of inhaling, the Marlboro Man with a tracheotomy.
While the masks might seem a bit cartoonish and callous to survivors of the diseases they depict, using ghosts of smokers future in an effort to deter new habits is a strategy tried and true. Canada’s cigarette packaging features graphic photos of tar-blackened lungs, cadavers with post-autopsy chest staples, and gangrenous limbs. PSAs threatening black hairy tongues and wrinkled skin fill middle school health classes the world over. Such visual threats are shown in studies to work better than written warnings, an example of the power of graphic design in our daily lives, Halloween or any other.
http://www.fastcodesign.com/3019920/haunting-halloween-masks-depict-the-horror-of-smokers-ruined-faces
= new reply since forum marked as read
and had a really tough life. Every time I see her I feel really bad for her, because she knows that she is continuing to make her face even more wrinkled and pale gray as she continues to smoke.
So many smokers who have been smoking for decades have that same type of facial degeneration, you can always tell them just by looking at them, it's not just the wrinkles but that telltale sallow, sickly, pale gray skin color that looks like the death mask of the moribund.
Nicotine totally sucks.
She didn't make the 90+ years that was common for women in her family because she was always smoking.
90 year old women in nursing homes, when they first met my grandma, thought she was their age or older, even though she was twenty years younger.
Cigarettes are a pretty awful addiction, as bad as many illegal drugs.
I think all addictions ought to be treated as a public health problem. Anyone addicted to a drug (alcohol, nicotine, opiates, whatever...) ought to be able to walk into free clinic for help, without any fear of entanglements with the legal system.
It's better for society if an addict has easy access to safe drugs (even opiates and amphetamines) than it is if an addiction forces addicts into crime, prostitution, etc., to pay for dangerously impure street drugs.
We could end the criminal drug trade tomorrow but too many people are making too much money from it, including our law enforcement bureaucracies and money-laundering big banks.
The SWAT teams of the DEA and the police, the banks, and the drug gangs do not want drugs to be decriminalized. They are making too much money and their political power is increasing. Decriminalization drugs would fuck up their business models and political aspirations.
