A Mystery

On my afternoon walk as usual, I saw from a distance what looked like a plastic garbage bag by a bench and thought some uncivic-minded person must have thrown out their trash on the path.

But as I got to the bench and looked closer, I noticed something odd.

The bench was securely fastened to the boardwalk.  How did whoever threw out the garbage bag manage to do this?

For a moment I was perplexed, but then I looked behind the bench leg and realized there was a simple explanation.  Yes, of course -- no mystery here.

Then I became curious as to why someone would even do this.  Why take the trouble to snip the cutout handle, then tie it around the bench leg?  I looked inside the bag, and all I found was this:

An empty box.  The product name was an unfamiliar combination of Korean and English words meaning something like "proportionate shedding" or maybe "relative shading", and I still hadn't a clue as to what that could mean.  The only thing I could be relatively certain of, was that it must have something to do with makeup, as the name "Olive Young" was imprinted in that circle (it's a well-known cosmetics store chain).

So after I came home I looked up the product, and apparently it's a mix-and-match color palette for facial contour shading.  O.K., so that's what it was.

But the original mystery still remained:  why would anyone go to the trouble of cutting and re-tying a plastic garbage bag with an empty cosmetics container inside, to a bench on a footpath on a hillside?  Odd.