This verb bugs me.

What is wrong with using the verb “moisten” instead of “moisturize”?

Why must it be “Moisturize your face with Wet-o!”?

Why cannot it be “Moisten your face with Wet-o!”?

Perhaps some people who use “moisturize” like the “z” sound at the end of the verb.

For fun, I searched Google for each of the following verbs (with the quotation marks, to avoid variations) and got about the indicated numbers of matches:

• “moisten” — 1,540,000 matches
• “moisturize” — 1,520,000 matches

This tells me that “moisten” is 1.01 times as popular as “moisturize” on the Web.

The verb “moisten” dates back to the 1570s, whereas the verb “moisturize” dates back to World War II.

I have a hunch that the verb “moisturize” was coined by advertisers. If this hunch is true, then the Google search results show that advertisers within about sixty-five years have made “moisturize” almost as popular as a word that had a 370-year head start.