Please use the pair of readings that are linked – Krithika Varagur’s “The Skincare Con” and Helen Rosner’s “Christ in the Garden of Endless Breadsticks” – to support your own answer to the following question. Support your answer with your own close analysis of quotes and ideas from both texts. In this paper, please focus on using close-reading-based analysis of quotes from each reading to support your thesis. Your thesis should be based on your own answer to the questions, and you should support your thesis with analysis that uses close reading to connect ideas from the articles and place the texts in conversation with each other. Helen Rosner says, “what Olive Garden is actually selling is Olive Garden, a room of comfort and familiarity, a place to return to over and over.” Krithika Varagur says, “New skincare is (still) chiefly about buying things and displaying them for others to see” and “the end product of a skin care regimen isn’t perfect skin, but the regimen itself.”

How might what we buy sell us more than the goods or experiences we purchase?

Format: Final drafts must be at least 5 full pages in length, double-spaced, typed in a 12-pt. Times New Roman, and have 1-inch margins.

The links are down below.

https://theoutline.com/post/3151/the-skincare-con-...

https://www.eater.com/2017/10/3/16395312/olive-gar...

Please make sure to read both articles. Try using quotes to support your answer.

If you think it will help feel free to use these brainstorming questions below.

Brainstorming questions.

These questions are starting points that may help you approach the question above and not an outline for the paper or a list of issues you must address or even bring up in your paper.

• How do the choices we make about what to buy, including food, affect our identities? The way we see ourselves? The way others perceive us?

• Who influences our decisions about what we should want, or buy? What do the authors seem to think about consumer expertise versus the opinions of experts and connoisseurs? What do you think? Who else, besides experts like food consultants or doctors, might shape our decisions about what to buy and the way we think about those decisions?

• How do we decide what is authentic? What is authentically good food? Authentically Italian? Authentically good skin?

• What are some of the other factors each author discusses to complicate the focus of their article? Think about which aspects of those experiences, pressures, expectations, or conceptions surprised you the most. What challenged the way you think about restaurants, food, skincare, or beauty products and how? Would these ideas apply to other consumer decisions?

• What is each author’s argument? How did they support that argument? What other applications might this argument have? Which audience(s) do you think the author had in mind while making this argument?

• What are some of the assumptions upon which each authors’ claims rest? How did respond to those assumptions? Consider at least one assumption from each article and argue against it. How does challenging this assumption affect the author’s point? Your own ideas about consumerism?

• This semester we have talked a lot about connotations. How do Rosner and Varagur complicate the connotations of experiences or our choices as consumers?

• What do the ideas of the philosophers referenced in the readings have in common? What might they tell us about how we use buying goods and experiences to find or create meaning? Why do the authors use these references?