category
Beauty and Grooming

DJs from North Dakota's Y94 radio station created a hoax website called tattooyourtoddler.com. The site claimed to be "the first tattoo studio for kids, with the trendiest body-art designed specifically for youths ages 2 through 17!" Parents who wanted to tattoo their child were promised that "Our patented needle-free system only causes slight discomfort and ensures a vibrant tattoo, guaranteed not to fade for at least 10 years!" The FAQ section of the site included the question: "Is this legal?" To which the reply was: "This is still America, isn't it?" A similar April Fool's Day hoax had been perpetrated in 2003 by DJs at at Channel 933 KHTS-FM radio in San Diego who created a site called BabyInk.com, which claimed to be a tattoo parlor catering to infants and children.

Popular Photography Magazine ran a special feature (prominently dated April 1, 2005) on how to touch up photos in which subjects have unsightly wrinkles or unattractive expressions. "Can these photos be saved?" the article asked. One of the examples used was Dorothea Lange's classic Depression-era photo of a "Migrant Mother" huddling with her children in a roadside camp outside Nipomo, California. The original migrant mother has worry lines etched into her face from the stress of poverty, and she gazes into the distance as if wondering whether her family will survive. But under the masterful touch of Popular Photography editors, the Migrant Mother was transformed from an iconic symbol of the struggle for survival into a smooth-faced suburban soccer mom. Her wrinkles were erased, her gaze softened, and those depressing, poverty-stricken kids removed. Readers were appalled. The editors later noted that the article "generated more responses than anything we've done in years… Most of our readers got the joke. But many didn't. We received hundreds—yes, HUNDREDS—of rants, hate letters, and excommunication threats."

The German software company Application Systems Heidelberg debuted the iShave attachment for the iPod: "Now with your iPod you can not only hear good music everywhere, you can also get a smooth shave to look good."

Russian Public TV reported that a spring had been discovered in the Caucasus mountains with the ability to cure male baldness. "According to the latest statistics, the number of bald men in Adygeya has plummeted," the report noted. The news program showed "before" and "after" pictures of the man who had made the discovery. The BBC had perpetrated a similar April Fool's Day hoax in 1977.

The Daily Mail announced that Esporta Health Clubs had launched a new line of socks designed to help people lose weight. Dubbed "FatSox," these revolutionary socks could actually suck body fat out of a person's feet as they sweated. The invention promised to "banish fat for ever." The socks employed a patented nylon polymer called FloraAstraTetrazine that had been "previously only applied in the nutrition industry." The American inventor of this polymer was Professor Frank Ellis Elgood. The socks supposedly worked in the following way: as a person's body heat rose, and their blood vessels dilated, the socks drew "excess lipid from the body through the sweat." After having sweated out the fat, the wearer could then simply remove the socks and wash them, and the fat, away.

The Russian newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets reported that Mikhail Gorbachev had volunteered to test a revolutionary new anti-baldness spray. As a result he had sprouted a new head of hair, covering his famous birthmark. Accompanying the article was a picture of Gorbachev on a trip to South Korea sporting his new, curly-locked look.

Nationwide, a BBC television program, profiled a well located on James Coatsworth’s farm in Rothbury, Northumberland. This well supposedly had the power to make hair grow on bald men’s heads.