Beyaz’s Department Store of Life

by Liz Colville

Beyaz is a new type of birth control by Bayer that is like Yaz, but contains folate, a B vitamin, whose aim is to preemptively stop your child from having birth defects should you at some point go off the pill and soon after, get pregnant. I’m serious, that’s what it’s for! Bayer is looking out for you, so far down the road of life, farther than you can even see, because they can afford high-powered binoculars and you can’t. But actually, life is not a “road”; it’s a store.

In Beyaz’s latest ad, which is so very long, to accommodate all the questions lawyers may have, four women (an Asian woman, an African-American woman, a brunette, and … what! a quirky redhead!) beam as they stroll through a brightly-lit department store containing miniature things of their dreams: houses, diplomas, paper doll men trapped inside plastic trophy-like structures, the kind of trophy you get if you’re like a businessperson, and picnic baskets with waterfalls in them. There’s even one of those annoying perfume-spritzer guys, except instead of a guy it’s a stork, and instead of a perfume it’s a baby in a purple sack, which the brunette woman politely declines. After they’ve all chosen (“It’s good to have choices”) and purchased their items, none of which are children, they drive off with a human-sized Eiffel Tower replica on top of their car. FIN.