Or just enjoy a rousing discussion about truth, honor and patriotism…wait…that’s the other guy.
I can adjust.
edit - yep - that works.
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I really never understood “unisex.” I always thought it should be “bisexual” because they served both sexes,* where I understood uni to mean one. Or was uni an abbreviation for united? Really, that interpretation just hit me.
*Back in the day before intersex, asexual…
Well, “uni” in “united” is the same prefex as “uni” as in “one”. United = made one.
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Don’t make the mistake of confusing words people use on the internet for common use in society. They are not the same thing.
Nor do I. However, when marketing a product, unless you are targeting a specific group, then using jargon is usually unhelpful.
Ngrams searches digitised books, not webpages.
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Uni is meant as one and in this word it can be read as “shared” as in united or the “the whole” as in universe or university. So the word would break down to shared (by all) sexes or “the whole of” the sexes.
Wow, that’s even a smaller subset of society.
You mean to suggest that the words commonly used in books aren’t representative of the words commonly used by society?
Let me turn this around: what evidence do you have that “unisex” is in ‘common use in society’ in a way that “gender-neutral” is not? What constitutes ‘common use in society’ in your opinion? Who counts as ‘society’?
I can’t help but feel (and it is of course possible that I’m being unfair) as if you’re picking some nebulous corpus of ‘common words’ based on just your own anecdotal experience, which renders it impossible to argue against your point.
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I thought the same thing, feels more like a marketing technique.
Agreed. I could imagine the customer outrage. “When I bought it it was makeup for men, but overnight it morphed itself into makeup for women! Now it’s useless!”
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Almost certainly. The book reading public is a very small segment of society.
You are entirely correct. My opinions here have been completely anecdotal. I supposed that since I wasn’t attempting to counter any studies or numbers presented by anyone, it seemed to me that’s what we were all doing.
So, I did a very simple and very unscientific test. Google returned 489,000,000 hits for “unisex” and 18,400,000 for “gender neutral”. That shows unisex being used 26 times more often than gender neutral. Of course, terms on the internet are not truly representative of terms used by society as a whole so that result is highly questionable.
What metric are you using to support the idea that the term “gender neutral” is a common one? I mean, I think it’s pretty common but that’s just anecdote isn’t it?
Everyone. It’s a unisex term.
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True, but the book-writing public surely is (as a rule of thumb) aiming to capture as wide a market as possible, no?
Ah, that is more convincing than my search.
Oh none at all. I too was basing that on my anecdotal experience until I did that ngrams search. I only remarked on your lack of sources after I did that and I found your first counterpoint unconvincing. But a general google is actually probably a far better measure than an ngrams search, so I think I must concede your point here.
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Hey, that’s available at my local corner All Natural Locally-Grown Organic New Age Non-GMO No-Pesticide Foodstuff grocery store!
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I guess this is a fun idea for a line of cosmetics, and they don’t seem too overpriced.
As someone stated upthread, all makeup is already inherently ‘gender neutral,’ as anyone can buy and use it; but good on Crayola for actively marketing their line that way.
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That was awesome!
And it featured Tom, so I’m happy… 
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Slurping is a proven method of extracting gender fluid!
(I’ll see myself out now.)
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Pretty much every child I knew tried to use crayons as makeup at least once. The wax base is hard at room temp and it doesn’t go on- that is a feature, not a bug, because the artist-type crayons get color everywhere that’s hard to wash off skin and impossible to get out of clothes, upholstery, walls, etc…
The crayola makeup crayons are hella-expensive compared to drugstore-bin brands but will get sales due to ‘authentic’ brand name and cutesy packaging.
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My gender fluid’s getting low. I should go into the shop and get it topped up.
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In terns of getting people to hand over money for things that make them feel attractive, “unisex” isn’t going to sell because most (female?) people have shudders remembering the horrible “unisex” gym shorts or whatever some adult got you in fourth grade.
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Or maybe Omnisex? (EG: Omnidirectional vs. Unidirectional).
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So I clicked on the link to see the products, price and ad campaign with ¿men and women? ¿Men, women, nonbinary,genderqueer and gender fluid models?-dunno because to keep going I had to select either “Men” or “Women” to get into the products for sale, even supposing that they are going to have duplicated the items in each, tidy, binary side of the gender wall.
So I searched for “crayola” in the bar, and found some products. None of which featured a model, just the makeup and a pic of how it would look should you want to doodle with your makeup on notebook paper.
Thanks to the happy mutant who provided the gorgeous pic of the guy with the yellow eye makeup.
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