Would you be willing to spend $200 to get smoother feet?

One day, my friend was raving about this new product she had bought from Sephora. She said it made her face feel amazingly clean and look beautiful, so my curiosity was piqued. The product was a face-cleansing device made by Clarisonic, a skincare company that brags on its website that "unlike spinning devices, our patented sonic cleansing technology works with skin's natural elasticity, oscillating at a sonic frequency that produces over 300 movements per second." I thought the ~$200 she had spent on it was a waste of money, but I forgot about the product until now.

Today I learned that last month, Clarisonic released a new product: a pedicure device. It still costs $200, and it's impossible to put the rougher brush heads meant for foot-scrubbing inside the original Clarisonic devices. This is to be expected, of course. The company can make much more money if they don't make their new devices compatible with older ones. But this is a huge waste of money and environmental resources. Anyways, I bet I could get the same results for under $10 with lotion and a pumice stone. But people like to use the newest, fanciest, scientific-sounding devices to make themselves pretty and soft rather than using boring, ordinary options available from the drugstore. The purchasers of Clarisonic products probably only feel more beautiful after using them because they have to convince themselves that their purchase was worth it -- otherwise, they'll feel like fools for buying into the marketing instead of just washing their face or using a pumice stone on their rough feet.