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Smart gals know what it takes to be confident around a masher, reads a vintage-looking magazine as making the social media rounds since mid-2017. What does it take to be confident, according to this print advertisement? A .38 caliber Colt Cobra snub-nose revolver — for that strange, depraved creep who won't leave you alone. Here's an example of the ad via Twitter: The copy goes on with its pitch as follows: Although the overall appearance of the ad is convincing at first glance, the closer one looks the more preposterous its content reveals itself to be. The image is a parody of 1950s advertising, but a number of inconsistencies and anachronisms stand out. The magazine named in the lower righthand corner, for example — Ladies Life & Household, it's supposedly called — never existed (or if it did, every trace of it has been expunged from modern records). The handgun's finish is described as Colt's beautiful pacifier blue — an obvious satirical reference to 1950s gender role stereotypes (if Colt ever manufactured a pacifier blue firearm, no examples of it exist to be found today). The pistol shown in the illustration, allegedly a Colt Cobra .38 (the same kind of revolver Jack Ruby used to kill JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald in 1963), appears to be a different model altogether. The image matches up fairly closely to one we found in a mid-1970s ad for a Colt Detective Special (third series, introduced in 1973): And what about that leering creep? The face of the mouth-breathing lunkhead with droopy, lifeless fish eyes who serves as the villain of the tableau shows unmistakable signs of digital tampering. It isn't just the eyes that droop: From all of the above it makes sense to suppose that there was an existing scanned image, most likely of another vintage ad, that served as a template for the Colt Cobra parody. A reverse-image search provided instant confirmation that that is the case — the Colt Cobra ad is a reworking of a full-page advertisement for Gleem Toothpaste that appeared on page 110 of Life magazine on 11 February 1957:
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