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The Skinny on A Cellulite 'Cure'
By Jennifer Frey
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 25, 1999; Page C01
So you've had your thighs vacuumed and your stomach stapled. You've had some fat from
your butt repotted in your lips and ingested everything from seaweed to fen/phen. You've
given up carbohydrates, given up fats, given up fats in combination with carbohydrates,
eaten cabbage soup for three weeks and purchased that vile thigh exerciser that Suzanne
Somers hawks on late-night TV.
And the cellulite remains. Your face is smooth, your stomach is flat, you can fit into a
size 6 bikini. But turn your back to the mirror and there it is on the tops of your
thighs: lumpy, bumpy, dimpled fat. Cottage cheese fat. Liposuction-defying, diet-surviving
cellulite.
Enter Gianfranco Merizzi. Merizzi, an Italian chemist, swears that his new product -
Cellasene - can burn away those lumps and bumps with a simple red pill. Cellasene,
he claims, won't just reduce the appearance of cellulite, it will cure it.
"Almost all the women who have tried it have had results," Merizzi said via cell phone
from somewhere in Italy. "In a number of cases, you can get rid of cellulite completely!"
Merizzi and his marketers are counting on hype as much as anything to capture the interest
of the market -- a plan that worked wonders in Australia, where the appearance of Cellasene
in stores resulted in mini-riots as women scrambled to obtain it. Canadian newspapers already
are reporting Cellasene shortages in Ottawa and Vancouver. Rexall Sundown, which launched the
product with a news conference in New York a few weeks ago, provided its sales representatives
with buttons that read: "Don't Panic, There's Still Some Cellasene Left." None of those buttons
has been spotted in the Washington area, though Cellasene has been shipped to local warehouses
and is expected to be on shelves soon at local franchises of CVS, Rite Aid, Wal-Mart and Kmart.
There is no reasonable scientific evidence to support any of this demand. Cellasene might prove
to be just the latest way to separate pathologically optimistic women from their money. Arthur
Frank, a physician at George Washington University's Obesity Management Center, certainly thinks so.
"It's a fraud!" he said the minute the name "Cellasene" was mentioned. "It's a plain, simple,
unmitigated, outright, blatant fraud! Can I be gentle about that? NOOOOOO!"
Merizzi sniffed in response. "Please. Of course there are doctors who are skeptical. But they
don't know the composition, they don't know the action, they don't know the clinical results.
They don't know anything, but they like to give their opinions anyway."
Cellasene is technically not a drug, so it's not subject to Food and Drug Administration
regulations. Classified as a dietary supplement, it is said to be made of a combination of
ingredients including ginkgo biloba, sweet clover, borage, grape seed extract and bladderwrack
(an iodine-laden herb from the oceans of Asia that was once touted as a cure for goiter) in
amounts unspecified on the package.
It sells for around $40 for a 10-day supply (the recommended treatment period is eight weeks,
with maintenance dosages for a second eight weeks, which means about $160 per thigh).
Cellasene comes in a two-tone pink box with this claim on the front: "Helps Eliminate Cellulite."
In small print underneath, this disclaimer is added: "This statement has not been evaluated by
the Food & Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or
prevent any disease."
What is supposed to be happening in your body to zap the cellulite is a little vague - it's
either increasing blood circulation that releases trapped fat, or raising the metabolic rate
in that area, or it's repairing the blood vessels to decrease congestion. Merizzi, working
with an Ital ian university, conducted three small studies. None of them has been published,
and only one was a double-blind study (in which neither the tester nor the subjects know who
is receiving the product and who is receiving a placebo). The results, according to Merizzi,
show a "significant" decrease in cellulite in 85 percent of the 65 women involved. Currently,
Rexall Sundown - Cellasene's American distributor - is underwriting another double-blind study,
to be run by George Beraka, a New York plastic surgeon.
"Unlikely things occasionally pan out," Beraka said. "My attitude is, let's be extremely skeptical,
but I think it's worth the study."
There are two dirty secrets about cellulite. First, only women get it. Second, even skinny women
get it. It's a tissue thing - women have connective tissue in certain parts of their bodies that
forms a honeycomb pattern under the skin, and consequently traps fat in that pattern.
"As a result," Frank explained, "fat that's normally there, that's supposed to be there, gets sort
of bundled into this lobulated appearance. It has nothing to do with [being] fat at all. You can
have it if you are normal weight, underweight, overweight. There is no harmful effect, except in
terms of appearance - and I don't want to dismiss that, because I know it is uncomfortable for
many people."
Beraka prefers the word "obsessed" when it comes to describing the relationship between women and
their cellulite. Beraka, who said he always tells his liposuction patients that even surgery can't
solve the problem entirely, likens women and their fight against cellulite to balding men and their
battle to regrow lost hair.
"I've had a woman tell me that when her thighs look sloppy, she doesn't feel clean," Beraka said.
"It really is an obsession."
Merizzi first realized the extent of the obsession when he was judging the Miss Italy pageant in
1992 and several contestants - including the runner-up - approached him afterward to moan about
their cellulite.
"They said to me, 'We are very beautiful but we have cellulite in our thighs -- Look! Look! Look!' "
Merizzi recalled, "and I felt that something should be done."
Merizzi is far from the first soul to seek, and market, a remedy for cellulite. Various nostrums -
ranging from body wraps and massages to topical creams - long have been hailed as cellulite busters.
Currently, Clarins is pushing a cream ($46 for a seven-ounce bottle) that ostensibly fights cellulite,
advertising it with a display that reads "New serious cellulite control." Clarins does not claim that
Lift Minceur 2000 -- made from a "cocktail" of caffeine, garcinol, butcher's broom (an anti-inflammatory
that also helps fight hemorrhoids), horse chestnut, and cangzhu root extract -- actually cures the problem.
Oh no. It just "helps."
Cure or no cure, Clarins representative Josephine Soong gets asked about cellulite dozens of times a
day, and not just by the face-lift set. "We get all kinds of women," she said, "all kinds of ages,
and all walks of life." The other day, she signed up a janitor at the mall for some firming cream.
At Tysons Corner on a recent weekend, women in the midst of that most horrifying of spring rituals
- the hunt for a bathing suit -- seemed surprised, but intrigued, by the news.
"Look, I'll try just about anything," said Nancy Caffey, who purchased what she described as "a
very tame" Speedo suit that "discourages the expectation that there will be a beach bunny inside."
"Do I hate cellulite? Of course I do. I also hate stretch marks, but this is the price you pay for
being a woman."
Leslie Griffin, forty-something ("Don't ask my age!"), was grabbing a quick lunch in the Tysons
food court. "Well, I'm not too keen on the idea of having my fat sucked out of me with a vacuum
cleaner," she mused "But a pill? That wouldn't be too bad. Of course, I'd like to know before I
take it that it's not going to have some weird side effects or something. I mean, what good is it
to have great thighs if you've grown some huge mole on your head?"
Frank wonders at the appeal of Cellasene. "Why would anyone want to spend money on a product the
effectiveness of which has been verified by no one, of uncertain composition, of uncertain purity,
of uncertain potency, which even if it works as it claims to work is treating the wrong thing?" he
said after reviewing both the product and the reports.
"Why would you waste money on that?"
Why? To look good in that size 6 bikini, of course.
©Copyright 1999 The Washington Post Company
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