This Skin Care Company Claims Its Plan to Brighten the Moon 'Is Not a Joke'

You know how night is really great, except for the fact that it's just too damn dark? Yeah, I don't really think of that as a problem either—granted I live in a megalopolis, but as I recall, the night can get pretty dark, you know out in the woods or whatever. The only worldwide night light is the faint, slivery light of the Moon, but even that only comes in phases and, let's be honest, it pales in comparison to the Sun.

In any case, some people—the “lazy,” the “unimaginative,” the “sane,” call them what you will—just accept the dark of the night along with the cold of the winters, the heat of the summers, and the wetness of water. But there are visionaries who aren't content to leave night to the owls and the electric candlelight, and they see the solution hanging in the night sky already. These visionaries work for the Swedish skin care company FOREO, and they, no kidding, want to make the Moon brighter:

The goal is to save on electricity with one global (extraglobal?) solution. Their website makes it sound like, really, the most practical choice:

As the same side of the Moon always faces the Earth, it would only be necessary to treat just 0.1% of the total surface area to produce over 80% of the desired effect. In other words, only a small amount of terrain (approximately the size of Switzerland) needs to be transformed for the Earth to receive extraordinary benefits. When compared to costly, time-consuming solutions such as solar panel production or swapping every incandescent light for an LED light, brightening the Moon could actually be a more feasible solution.

So an array of mirrors, or something reflective, the size of Switzerland that makes the world brighter for a couple of hours a night, a few nights a month. Don't worry about light pollution, because when there's a new Moon, you won't even notice the difference.

Man, I don't know what seems less likely: that there's a plan to make the Moon brighter being touted as the practical option, or that Foreo's website claims that they've already secured $52.9 million to start researching how to do it.

The company has a line of products called Luna, so I started suspecting that the whole thing was a ruse, a plan to give a more radiant glow to faces rather than heavenly bodies. Still it seems sort of cruel to talk about reducing CO2 emissions and easing the strain on developing economies just to sell vibrating facial scrubbers. The company is Swedish and remembering that they've got sort of a weird sense of humor up there, I fired off an email, asking what we all suspected: “Is this a joke?”

The reply from Katrina Goh, Foreo's PR manager, was quick and polite: “Thank you for getting in touch regarding our Brighter Moon, it is not a joke.”

At that point the email shifts in text size and tone to a more boilerplate feel, and explains that far from being just a skin care company, Foreo is an “innovation company.”

For too long critical dimensions of our existence have been delegated to the institutional level that, at the same time, has nothing, but effectively an appalling track record on the energy, environment and sustainable development fronts. From Doha to Rio, or the IPCC, for that matter, down to country-level programs, the success rates of sustainable development programs have been far below the 10% limit.

With the Brighter Moon project we want to engage the wider public on a new, direct and pragmatic, and ultimately much more effective way of making our lives better.

Still, parts of the email almost read like a perfect parody of technoutopianism. “The innovation reaches far outside technical solution, emancipating meaningful innovation from concept, or funding to communication and ultimately realization," it read. That's language that's innovatively been emancipated from meaning. So I followed up, asking who else was involved and if someone involved in the project would be available to chat.

“This project has been funded by over 9,000 independent backers. We can disclose that one individual backer, who has asked to remain anonymous, has supported the project, contributing 30 million USD,” Goh said. “We have now funded the first stage of the project, and with the funds acquired, we will begin feasibility studies on the methods to brighten the surface of the Moon.”

Sadly, the website reports that “due to the early stages of this project, patent rights and other issues, the FOREO Institute is unable to disclose details on the transformation process. However, we are currently in our testing phase, and our research and investigation is ongoing daily.” You don't want someone stealing your plan to make the Moon brighter, I guess.

Is it possible that my ability to believe that this is a real thing has been hampered by its being almost directly taken from a sketch on the BBC show “That Mitchell and Webb Look”? Considering that going to the Moon just to bounce around on the Apollo program cost something like $105 billion when you adjust for inflation, I'm thinking that gradually brightening the Moon over the course of 30 years is, at this point, charitably described as a longshot, even if you've got an anonymous, eccentric billionaire behind you.

But, you know what they say, "aim for brightening the Moon and even if you miss you'll end up brightening the stars." (No one says that.) FOREO is also working on an innovative new toothbrush. Maybe we need some aphorisms to encourage that.