Product review: Coco's Air Fresheners

I fell in love with Ice-T's wife Coco when I saw her on E! True Hollywood Story's "Hip Hop Wives." One of the high points of this documentary was when Coco clearly said the word "busimess," as in "We're always working on our busimess." Anyway, the blog I read to keep up with the doings of such people as Tom Cruise and Paris Hilton also keeps up with Coco, so Coco and her busimess are never far from my thoughts.

Imagine my delight when I discovered that the Internet's own one-stop clearinghouse for Coco-related merchandise, shopcoco.net, was selling air fresheners with her image on them. [The shopcoco.net site is probably NSFW.] I ordered them without delay.

I was both intrigued and disappointed when they finally arrived. The website said that I was ordering a 4-pack of fresheners. Six came in the package - two vanilla and four strawberry. The fact that I got two free fresheners bothered me a little because it made me worry that Coco's busimess plan might not be in order if everyone was getting free stuff.

On closer inspection, the fresheners have some troubling quirks. Example: The packaging for the vanilla fresheners has the word VANILLA printed on them in big letters, superimposed on a photograph of cinnamon. (Cristy pointed this out to me. I don't know if I would have ever figured it out on my own. She also pointed out that the two dark, vanilla bean-like objects floating behind the cinnamon could possibly be vanilla beans.) If you think this was just a mistake made in the packaging - made, perhaps, by a less-than-detail-oriented Engrish-speaking manufacturer of sundries in Hong Kong - think again: right on the freshener itself, there is an image of cinnamon sticks next to the word VANILLA. This makes me a little annoyed at Ice-T, who should be helping Coco to proof read things.

Also, at the top, the packaging says "Coco's". Not "Coco's World" or "Coco's Air Fresheners". Just "Coco's". Maybe this is a little nitpicky of me to point this out. I'm sorry Coco.

This last observation is hard for me to write because it is also a little bit of a confession: I had not considered how they would smell when I ordered them. Artificial strawberry smell is somewhat nauseating. Artificial Vanilla/Cinnamon is not as bad, but it's still an odor most people don't want around them. It's a little presumptuous to call these air "fresheners." "They're air stinkeners. I don't know why you don't think of these things," said Cristy, suggesting that I have a long history of buying air fresheners online and then expressing disappointment at their odor. Which is not the case.

In conclusion, I would just like to write the word busimess one more time.