Witnessing History in the Making

7.8.13

I know, I know. I'm sure some of you are already sick and tired about me not shutting up about the World Records, but it's just too cool. I'm personally not a big facial person, as of date. But I'm not writing that into stone as I change my mind quite easily. 
Anyway, back to July 28th, the day I took part in the official ruling of the new Guinness World Record for the Most People Applying Facial Masks. Every good story needs a start, so let's start there, shall we? 
As I'm sure a lot of you know, I was the translator for The Adjudicator from Guinness on a previous attempt a week before. We quickly became friends and he told me that he was going to come to Taiwan the following weekend to witness another attempt. "I'm not that interested in facials, but it would be fun seeing a lot of people wearing masks," were his words after invited me. He knew me too well, seeing a lot of people wearing masks was the marketing point for me. 
(the mall strip and the huge Iron Man in front of it)
A week later, I took a quick bus ride to Taipei 101. And for the next hour, as there was a sudden change in plans, I had the worst shopping trip ever (nothing, literally nothing I wanted to buy was in stock. It was like God telling me not to thrust my money into the faces of capitalism). Finally fed up with trying to spend my money, I strolled over to the building. At first I was worried that I wasn't going to be able to locate the venue, but there were arrows and the My Beauty Diary logos everywhere so it was near impossible to get lost.
Because I wasn't a participant, I didn't have the official statement that would allow me into the venue. So I had to answer "Who are you?" "Who are you looking for?" "Does he know you're here?" "Can you call him?" at least half a dozen times. After they were sure that I wasn't some crazy stalker or terrorist, they finally let me in. I was there early, so I did some catching up with The Adjudicator. I went into this event thinking that I was just there to meet up with an old friend, but as soon as our mutual friend K showed up, The Adjudicator had something different in mind. He asked K and I to help him take part in the official counting. There were people from the host team to do that, but he wanted people on his side. I already had experience from the week before but there were different criteria to be met in this attempt so after The Adjudicator went over them with us, K and I developed a plan to divide and conquer. He took one side of the room, and I the other. 
 (excuse the crappy phone photos...I didn't have my camera on me that day)
 The Stage from where I was standing
 The display of the newest My Beauty Diary facial masks (and that's one of the celebrities that came that day)
(it was a sea of fuzzy pink bow headbands)
At this time, the venue with over 1100 seats, was filling up rather quickly. The event was held by My Beauty Diary, so each of the participants had 2 My Beauty Diary facial masks, a pink fuzzy headband, and a bottle of water (I later found out that they left with an additional 4 boxes of My Beauty Diary facial masks and 2 bottles of vitamins...talk about a great goodie bag!). There were photobooths on one side of the venue where you could take photos with the official event logo or something. And as all things are when it comes to leaving memories, the queue for that was crazy long. 
They announced the start of the event. The host showed up on stage. Then there were really bad cheerleaders that danced the event into high spirits. And then they invited the two faces of the event out. They were two celebrities, and apparently, they're both quite famous in Taiwan. But I'm guilty of knowing next to nothing about the showbizz here so I wasn't sure what the hype was about. Anyways, after what seemed like ages, the host finally led the crowd to take the vow that all attempts had to take. The buzzer started, K and I started screening the rows for those that didn't qualify.
Helping out a friend in need...
 The rules were you had to keep your facial mask on for the whole 5 minutes and the facial has to be applied properly, so basically, there weren't really any rules. I didn't think anyone from the 500/600 people I had to screen would disqualify, but there were people that kept removing their masks. A couple were using the plastic, rather than the mask itself, to do their facial, and there were a couple of cases where the participants just didn't know how to keep the facial on their face, and it looked like their face was melting. Interestingly enough, most of those that were struggling to make the record were men. Silly men, but at least they were trying. 
People, especially those in the back and those of the host team, kept staring at me with questioning eyes. I'll have to admit, I did look quite out of place, walking up and down the aisle, making notes on my phone and neither wearing the official badge for Guinness, yellow to represent the host team, nor pink to mark I was a participant. I'm not particularly shy to attention, but it was getting too intense, their burning stares and questioning eyes. But when The Adjudicator made his rounds to where I was, I saw all the question marks disappear as I informed him on the count that I had. When I made my way back to the front, instead of stares, there were whispers of who I was that followed. It was getting kind of weird and way too much attention for my liking, so I went back to texting K who was on the other side of the room. 
The massive amount of press was why it took 15+ minutes to take each photo...
A couple of minutes later, the masks were taken off, the press started taking the official photos of everyone holding up their masks, and the host invited The Adjudicator on stage. The host went through the long introductions before asking The Adjudicator to announce the results. Everyone, even I, who wasn't that engaged in the event before that moment, was nervous. Would we break the previous World Record? Would we make that mark in history? The Adjudicator first did the polite "I'm so happy to be here..blah blah blah," he then announced the previous record was 1017 (or something around that). He took a long pause (this man knows how to be dramatic) before announcing the final official count - 1213. We did it. We broke the record. The room erupted into cheers, The Adjudicator tried to say congratulations in Chinese, but two weeks of me drilling him the seven words were silenced as the host interrupted by announcing that it was photo time. So the media all moved down the stage as the official certificate was brought out and the president of My Beauty Diary and the two celebrities came back on stage to accept the award. The next quarter hour was filled with a lot of "Look to the left," "Look to the right," "And now the middle," photo sessions before the event awkwardly finished with the celebrities and The Adjudicator having a mini press conference on stage. 
The Adjudicator presenting the official certificate
K and I hung around to wait for The Adjudicator as he modeled for pictures with the participants that wanted to take a photo with him. The queue was ridiculously long, but if I had participated, I'd want to have a photo with the official. K and I waited for nearly an hour before The Adjudicator finally had a break. We checked with him on his later schedule, decided to hang out when he was done with business, before K and I went to have our first meal of the day (it was already 4 PM) 
A massive replica of the official certificate 
The Adjudicator, me, and K (again, sorry, crappy photos...bad lighting+camera phone)
Anyway, I won't ramble on with what happened the rest of the day (which was a lot of window shopping, and grabbing dinner with The Adjudicator).  The event was more than memorable. Getting to see history in the making, the establishment of a New World Record definitely isn't something that you see every day. It was like a huge pampering party while breaking the world record on the side. Personally, besides getting to meet up with old friends, I got to even out my World Record Experience, now a 50% success rate. Pretty good odds, I'd say, considering that only 25% of all attempts are actually successful.
So there you have it, my second World Record attempt experience and my first successful World Record attempt. It was quite a long ramble but I hope you guys found it interesting, and I'm not just amusing myself here with this post. And hopefully from now on, I'll start shutting up about the world records.

Have you entered my INTERNATIONAL MAC lipstick giveaway yet?

Follow on Bloglovin

Share This Story

Tags:

10 comments