In the spot, which has a low budget, Cassavetes-like vibe, Jungers sits behind a desk and gamely endeavors to recite her lines. "All I ask is what I do and what's happened between the golf legend and I to be between us, and spare me and let me shop." Prepositional phrase mangling -- that's so edgy.

She then explains that they have the latest gadgets, "from Nikons to iPods to hair straighteners" -- at which point she absently touches her own straight hair. And when she says, "Seriouslyguysthisisfunyououghttotrythisatleastonce," it's the bravest triumph of chutzpah over ability since Pierce Brosnan opened his mouth to sing in Mamma Mia!

Proving that the goodwill of the Ginger Spice era has long expired, The UK retail chain Tesco found itself red-faced this after launching a massive dud of a holiday card.  Depicting a red-haired child on St. Nick's lap, it reads, "Santa loves all kids. Even GINGER ones." The card enflamed the ire of Davinia Phillips, the British mother of three redheads, who took her case to the court of public opinion. Despite earning the nickname "ginger whinger" (okay, that's pretty funny), Tesco withdrew the cards. They did however helpfully explain that they were "intended to be humorous." 

In further flame-haired news, the British Advertising Standards Authority upheld its first ban based on offensiveness to a group's hair color today after pulling Virgin Media's ad for a dating show that asked, "How do you spot a ginger in the dark? Looks or personality, who wins?" Virgin explained that the campaign was meant to "challenge people's perceptions of attractiveness and encourage decisions based on personality as well as looks".

Coming so soon on the heels of last month's Facebook motivated "Kick a Ginger Day," which resulted in the schoolyard beating of a California child, well, it's enough to make one's Viking blood boil over.

Redheads have been feared and reviled since the Middle Ages, of course. Looking for a fall guy for your blighted crops? That dame with the devil hair looks pretty suspect, don't you think? But this new spate of gingerism – yes, there's a word for it -- seems to stem from an old episode of South Park that was a satire of the very thing it has become. In a classic, hate-speech filled half hour about people who look different, Cartman declared, "Ginger kids have no souls." Good one South Park! Flash-forward a few years, and I have yet another reason to get my ass kicked today by people with no sense of irony.

I don't take the red rage so personally, because I'm a ginger not by birth but by Clairol. But while I find it entertaining when South Park suggests a connection between red tresses and being "vile and disgusting," I also think it's pretty freaking sad that any corporation would get traction out of the notion that a) Santa has work harder to love us and b) that we represent some triumph of personality over looks. You tell that to Julianne Moore! Or David Caruso! We happen to be a thriving specialty porn genre, I will have you know.

There will always be those who judge a pale, freckled book by its auburn-tressed cover. And when there's nobody left to make fun without seeming politically incorrect, people will still make fun of redheads. Soon there may not even be redheads to make fun of – in 2007, National Geographic reported that natural born redheads – who represent only two percent of the world's population -- are dying out, and may be extinct within a few generations.  In the meantime, the Weasleys and Tori Amoses of the world will do their best to stand tall. Just watch out for those famous tempers. As one of literature's great gingers, Anne of Green Gables, said, "You'd find it easier to be bad than good if you had red hair. People who haven't red hair don't know what trouble is."

I spoke with Brian Wansink, author of "Mindless Eating" and director of Cornell's Food and Brand Lab, where he does things like making bowls that slowly refill themselves to see how much soup a person will unconsciously eat if it's sitting in front of them.

Let's get right to it: Will this ad be effective?

Well, it's getting a lot of buzz, but it'll be most effective for the people who need it the least, people who are already very nutrition vigilant -- they'll be the ones talking about it. People with healthy lifestyles see something like that, and they all start talking about it like it's the coolest thing since the toaster.

But the people who need it the most are going to be the most dismissive. There's a segment of people in between who will respond to it, but as in a lot of these campaigns in the past, the effect is extremely temporary.

People's food habits are what they are because they like them. They might drink less soda today or tomorrow. But then they might forget about the message, or if they see it over and over, they'll become immune or dismissive of it.

OK, let's back up a little bit. Say you had a bad time with brown liquor and can never have whiskey again. How do we create associations with food that last?

Well, it's very fortunate that we do, first of all. It's evolutionary driven. The kind of person who ate sour berries and kept getting sick eating sour berries eventually died from eating sour berries. Let's say you get pneumonia and you had fried fish beforehand -- you'll be a long time from having fried fish again. It's your body thinking, "That almost killed me." But these aversions don't always last a lifetime. The taste for it might come back, depending on how much you liked the food beforehand. If you've never had it before, that's it. It's never going to happen.

We did a really cool study of WWII vets in the South Pacific, on whether they ate Chinese food 50 years after the war. The basic conclusion was that if people weren't in heavy combat, they could still like it. But if they did experience combat, they hated, hated, hated Chinese food even 50 years later, with the exception of one small group who liked Chinese food before going to war. Remember, this was in the '40s, so not very many people had had it, but those who did, could like it again. But if the first time you had it was with grenades thrown at you ...

But this ad can be pretty traumatic, even if not on that level. Why can't this ad create those kinds of associations?

To some extent, it's the visual thing. If you're a big lover of soft drinks, you won't suspend disbelief. You know how you can do that thing? "It's only a movie. It's only a movie. Because I like Coke." There isn't a powerful physiological connection, like what eating a bad piece of fish will produce. That's a real important part of this.

So is an ad campaign useless?

By itself, it will be pretty much useless. The memory trace of that ad might be strong, but it's going to be pretty short, and will be pretty easily overwhelmed by the fact that you're hungry.

Does it have a positive impact? Yeah, but the most positive impact will be on people who need that the least. There are probably some people who really don't know there are a lot of calories in pop, so it might be a positive influence. But if they don't know that, they might not care.

So if this won't work, what would be effective?

So much goes back to what we do in our homes. We keep believing, "It's not me, it's the fast food industry, the soda industry, etc." But once a parent or nutritional gatekeeper realizes that they control 72 percent of what their family eats, then it can be like, "Wait, there're a lot of small things I can do." Put a fruit bowl out. Don't go to a cheesy chain, and order a salad instead of fries and ranch dressing.

It's tricky to imprint these influences. You might be a great nutritional role model, but your kids may rebel against you. So there's a balance you have to strike. 

More precisely, Procter and Gamble is being blamed for Photoshopping the hell out of her face in an advertisement for an Olay eye cream, erasing crows' feet and under-eye bags with the flick of a mouse rather than diligent long-term application of the cream in question. The U.K.'s Advertising Standards Authority has banned the ad, on grounds that "the post-production re-touching of this ad, specifically in the eye area, could give consumers a misleading impression of the effect the product could achieve."But interestingly, the ASA rejected the idea that such images might harm women, beyond fleecing them out of a few bucks. 

"We considered that consumers were likely to expect a degree of glamour in images for beauty products and would therefore expect Twiggy to have been professionally styled and made-up for the photo shoot, and to have been photographed professionally," it said. "We concluded that, in the context of an ad that featured a mature model likely to appeal to women of an older age group, the image was unlikely to have a negative impact on perceptions of body image among the target audience and was not socially irresponsible." (Not surprisingly, that's pretty much what Procter and Gamble is saying as well.) But actually, says Liberal Democrat MP Jo Swinson, who's launched a campaign against out-of-control retouching, "Experts have already proved that airbrushing contributes to a host of problems in women and young girls such as depression and eating disorders."

In November, leading authorities on body image sent a paper to U.K. advertising authorities (available as a Word document here) outlining the relevant research. Over 100 published studies have documented "a detrimental effect of idealised media images" on girls and women -- and increasingly, boys and men. Body dissatisfaction is linked to damaging behaviors such as "unhealthy dieting regimes and problematic eating behaviours (starving, bingeing, and purging), clinical eating disorders (anorexia, bulimia), cosmetic surgery, extreme exercising, and unhealthy muscle-enhancing behaviours in boys and men (such as taking steroids or other supplements). It is also linked to depression, anxiety, sexual dissatisfaction, and low self-esteem." And as for claims that a "mature audience" should be savvy about what goes into creating a print ad, the paper says, "Although most people know in some abstract, general sense that media models are 'artificial' as a creation of make-up artists, hair stylists, and flattering clothing and camera angles, people are typically not aware of the extent to which models are altered, particularly by digital retouching and imaging techniques that reduce or enhance the size of virtually any body part, making eyes larger, waists slimmer, and legs longer and thinner."

Even when you are aware, in theory, of how much is possible via Photoshop, it can still come as a shock to see the difference between that ad and a current picture of Twiggy, or a Vanity Fair portrait of 60-year-old Meryl Streep and a shot of her with only the benefit of professional hair, make-up and photography. Of the latter, Susannah Breslin at the Frisky writes, "I understand Photoshopping. I really do. But I just don't get the point here. Increasingly, it seems like women who really don't need to be Photoshopped to death are getting altered into unrecognizable oblivion." And over time, those of us who consume these images get so used to seeing a particular look, we can lose sight of the fact that it's not only unrealistic for the average woman to aspire to, but literally impossible. Twiggy and Meryl Streep have teams of professionals to make them look their best in person and erase any "imperfections" in post-production, but the rest of us can only shell out for miracle eye cream, cross our fingers, and hate our aging bodies. I applaud the ASA for acknowledging that the Olay ad promised more than it could possibly deliver -- but to say the ad isn't socially irresponsible is to ignore a growing mountain of evidence that images "altered into unrecognizable oblivion" have far-reaching and sometimes devastating effects on real people.