Luminess (getbreeze.com) makes one of those air-blower makeup thingies, and their ads are all over many TV channels. A currently airing spot for a holiday sale is titled "Bye Bye, Cake Face," and early on there is a brief (couple of seconds, maybe) montage of several women getting cakes thrown in their faces. It came as a total shock to me - I had just glanced up at the TV, and there it was! Just about choked on my Raisin Bran. These commercials are always on some of the lesser cable and OTA channels (I happened to be on H&I when this popped up.)

I've tried to no avail to find it online. I did find a listing for it on iSpot.tv , but of course, of the dozen or so current Lunminess ads featured, it was the only link that led to an error screen and not the video. (As any longtime seeker of mainstream WAM material will be in accord, "It figures...") I'll keep an eye on it in case they fix it.

As it is a holiday sale ad, it won't be around for long, so please be on the lookout. I have no means of recording/capturing video with my current TV, so I hope someone finds this and preserves it before it's gone!

Me-TV? Were you watching the cartoon show hosted by the talking fish?

My error - it was actually H&I that I was on, and it aired during "Have Gun, Will Travel" if you can believe it. Not where you expect to find a makeup commercial!!

I'll correct the original post if I can still edit it.

Nice find! This must be it.

https://youtu.be/GMZlGFtW-D4

Wow - 16 minutes from posting to finding it. A UMD record?

Geez, it's even briefer than I thought -- might get a couple of brief GIFs out of it if I'm lucky!

The cake hits are reprised, even more briefly and shown filling only the left 40% of the screen, near the end of the video. But even though we see cakes impacting faces a total of eight times, looks like they only shot (or at least only used) two different hits, shown a total of four times each, with slightly different edits and croppings each time they appear. Here are some screencaps of what for me is the more attractive of the two victims.

One of my models actually sent me this video on IG about 2 weeks ago! I guess she has trouble sleeping at night and/or knows me too well.

The blonde's single hit gets repeated from a couple different angles. (Or, really, they just zoom in for one but it's the identical shot.) I actually love how someone fucked up the green-screen effect, resulting in a "double" behind her, and Luminess just ran with it. "Should we spend the extra 30 seconds to go back and fix that?? NAH! Who's gonna notice??"

Luminess sounds like my kind of people.

(The other model has a full-blown makeup job and gets clobbered nicely.... twice! Two different hits, both so short you really can't see any aftermath at all. If there's any justice, Luminess will get bored enough to release a BTS video so we can see something. See, once I start working for Luminess, we're gonna do a LOT more cake throwing and BTS videos....)

It looks like they started using this little montage at the beginning of December. It appears in several variations (twice in each spot) of the holiday 50% off pitch (different spot lengths, slogans, etc.). Strange I hadn't seen it before the other day as my TV is always on (their ads are always airing on one channel or another, but then again I had never actually sat and watched them; merely noted them in passing.)

The odd thing is, if you look at each ad a frame at time, it seems the little montage clip has some SLIGHTLY different edits in different spots. I'm talking very minor things, like an extra frame here, a dropped frame there, the graphics floating over the images starting a frame or two later, etc. For example, the blonde's sometimes starts with her eyes closed and mouth open, another starts with the cake already obscuring her face, and a single instance where there is an extra frame at the beginning where her eyes are open and her mouth is closed! So, whoever did the editing may have been tinkering with it for a while.

Also, for the blonde's clip, it's just the same hit from different angles, as has been pointed out, but the brunette is TWO separate hits (you can clearly see that her face is clean as one hit begins, but in the other, she has already been hit at least once).

But the REALLY odd thing is.....from the first time I saw these, I've had the nagging, growing feeling that I've seen this footage (in longer clips, too) somewhere before. The models, the type of cake, the manner in which the cakes are thrown, etc. look eerily familiar. (The blonde, especially, looks very familiar.) It's possible that this was not shot by the producers of the ads, but is actually some stock footage they found somewhere that has been previously used in another context. Anyone else have the same deja vu? Or I have I just seen so many WAM scenes over the decades that they are all starting to blur together in my memory?

BTW -- I, too, would love to see some BTS of the making of those clips (assuming they actually shot them). Wonder if they could be persuaded to do so online?

I love the way the UMD'ers analyze pie scenes the way some people watch the Zapruder film.

Neither of the women getting caked give me deja vu.... I might be wrong, but I've seen a LOT of mainstream clips over the years, and I feel like I would've remembered a longer version of either of these.

Back in my "early days" of WAM, I'd analyze certain mainstream clips forever. Particularly ones like this which are both:
1) very good, and
2) very poorly edited.

That kind of obsession led me to find the full version of the B&W "Roaring Twenties" clip, which was originally just a quick tease on a Hurley cliptape back in the day. Not gonna lie.... Finding that one was more satisfying than almost any WAM "purchase" I've made in the last 2 decades.

[Not an offense to any WAM producers, but nothing produced by this community really captures the "feel" of a good mainstream clip. That includes the stuff made by yours truly. We just don't have the budgets or the production quality. And weirdly, it feels like the frustration of quick editing and precious little aftermath is baked into the appeal of mainstream clips themselves.]

There have always been frustrating clips like this. (Remember the Pepsi ad about 20 years ago with the quick bit of a pretty girl getting pied? 5 frames - it was exactly 5 frames long.) But we still loved it. The thing about mainstream clips back in the day is that half the fun was in the hunt. It was in some ways more satisfying to find a rare clip that was perhaps very short, or not up to snuff in some way, than viewing excellent mainstream scenes that we easily accessed. It was gratifying to find ANY fragment of a lost or rare clip, because we had to work so much harder to find it.

Anyway, that's all I'm going to say about this. I yield to the younger whippersnappers before the "OK, Boomer" jibes begin, lol.

FWIW.....