Just a little story on personal appropriation of mass-produced commodities. The stores around here carry a vast diversity of nearly identical products for everyday use in mass-consumption style, like e.g. shower gel and sun milk. Sometimes the contents are perfectly identical and only the containers, the inscriptions upon the containers, and the price-tags differ. And then there are identical containers used for a range of different products. In this case the text is not imprinted directly on the container, but on stickers. The design of the stickers usually annoy me. It’s only the high-class products which sometimes feature designs that comfort me. But in the case of the above mentioned commodities of daily use I am reluctant to go into the upper price-segement. The lower-price-item stickers are all the more annoying, because they especially have been designed to look cheap. Yesterday I discovered that if you remove the stickers, the plain containers can quite look like something, their shapes bearing a certain amount of æsthetic. So I removed all the stickers from my newly acquired products. Design by retrostripping. Of course now you have to remember the geometrical shapes, and if those are identical, the colour-code. From left to right: my new shower gel, sun milk, and after sun lotion.