“Blushingly Funny” X-Ray Spex
Last week I made reference to the ubiquitous fraud product of my youth, the magic X-ray glasses for seeing through women’s clothing. By chance I stumbled across one of the ads, typical of its type, in the back pages of a 1964 Topper (soft-core porn) magazine:
“Unconditionally guaranteed to produce a genuine three-dimensional X-Ray illusion of any object viewed through the lenses.” That’s some high-quality bullshit right there! I also like the “Blushingly funny illusion!” claim that overlays the artwork. These scammers were telling on themselves right in the headline. The whole marketing package is the illusion, they think it’s funny that you the reader is falling for it, and they are blushing at their own fraudulent effrontery!
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Do you – or anyone reading – know what “3D X-Ray illusion” the product actually delivered? I’d pay $2 (in today’s money at least) just to be in on the joke – even if the joke was on me!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-ray_specs explains it pretty well:
> The “lenses” consist of two layers of cardboard with a small hole about a quarter-inch (6 millimeters) in diameter punched through both layers. The user views objects through the holes. A feather is embedded between the layers of each lens. The vanes of the feathers are so close together that light is diffracted, causing the user to receive two slightly offset images. For instance, if viewing a pencil, one would see two offset images of the pencil. Where the images overlap, a darker image is obtained, giving the illusion that one is seeing the graphite embedded within the body of the pencil.
And there’s a picture of what you would see if you looked through them at someone’s hand. It doesn’t look anything like an actual X-ray photo of a hand.
Thanks, Zack! Wow. “Brought to you by the same makers of the Amazing Sea Monkeys!”
what Zack said!! my dad had bought a pair from a magazine ad and we had a blast laughing as we looked through them. I think I was like 15 at the time.
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