The Trials of Testing

"My favorite review to date has been Joe Brown's piece on the Fubar," says Cliff Kuang, a testing editor at I.D. magazine, about a new hammer made specifically to break things rather than pound nails.

"Testing involved getting our art director, photographer, and writer up to a construction site in the Bronx, where they beat the hell out of a helpless section of drywall. It was cruel, but the ends — a nice piece with some interesting information about the hammer's design — justified the means. As you can imagine, a hammer built for demolition, with menacing jaws and a nicely sadistic 'breaker edge' for tearing holes, does not look like a whack-a-mole mallet. It actually looks like a torture device. Our writer got third party confirmation when a cop stopped him on the street and told him to 'drop the axe.' "

Brown, who works as an editor at Popular Science, notes however, that his testing experiences aren't always as great.

"Back in November I was evaluating a new water purifier," says Brown. "One of our staff members lives in the sticks north of the city, so I asked her to bring back some rural H20, because I'm not dumb enough to sip from the chemical-ridden swill south of the George Washington Bridge.

I drank about a liter of the Hudson River water, passing it through the purifier first, and, four days later, I woke up blind — it hurt too much to open my eyes — from dehydration. I had contracted Giardia, the result of a tiny parasite that slipped through the purifier's 15-micron-wide mesh and took up residence in my gut. The device failed our test."

Joanna Douglas, an editor at soon-to-be-shuttered ElleGirl also recalls a rough testing experience.

"One time I had a deskside appointment and a publicist decided that instead of dabbing a little of the product on my hand, she wanted to try a high-end ultra-expensive undereye cream on my face," says Douglas. "All was fine until about 10 minutes later after she left when a co-worker asked what was wrong with my face. Red puffy blotches appeared and I had to run out and buy cortisone cream."

Mishaps can also happen to the people not actually doing the testing, notes editor Tracie Egan from Bust magazine, who tries out everything from fold-up bicycles to sewing machines to vibrators.

"I guess one mishap worth mentioning was when I reviewed the DIY dildo kit, in which you make a dildo from a mold you create of a real ween," says Egan.

"I read the directions and everything, but sometimes with product samples, they won't include the whole packaging. Apparently, there was this 'tips' sheet that I didn't get that suggested you apply Vaseline to the balls of the dude you're casting. Since I didn't do that, the plaster got all stuck to my boner donor's ball hair and it turned out to be really painful for him.

"I had to get very close to his skin with some scissors to set him free, and he wasn't happy about that. That product sucked anyway. The dildo it made smelled like it would give you cancer."