The difference between you taking a flutter on one of those late-night, 800-number companies promising to promote your idea and Joy Toboroff doing the same thing is not that Joy has $10,000 lying around.

After all, lots of New York Sun readers have $10,000 in the lower left hand drawer of the dresser.

And it is not that she’s gorgeous, drop-dead beautiful, and lives in a sprawling, two-story modern apartment in Tribeca.

Lots of people, well, live in Tribeca.

It’s the MBA. Not any old MBA. Ms. Toboroff has one from Columbia, and that’s Ivy League. Plus she’s been in business before. She’s been an analyst, and has run an import business, and a catering firm, among others.

So when she saw the TV ad for one of those companies that promise to protect your idea, get you a patent, and help you develop the business (“One of those ‘If you have an idea, no matter how silly it is, call us’ places.”) she looked into it, bringing to the table some of the expertise she developed as an analyst for Equitable, and as an entrepreneur.

“So far I am very pleased,” she said yesterday. “They have done everything they said they were going to do, and they did it right on time.”

The product idea: bandages in a huge variety of colors, for blacks, whites, and folks in between – plus any subcategory of the above with the addition of a sunburn or suntan.

In fact, that’s how the whole thing started.

Ms. Toboroff was literally scooting around, on a scooter, in St. Tropez, where she and her husband, Leonard, have a home, and she had a small accident.

The resultant bandage might have matched her skin, if she wasn’t suntanned. But she was, and it didn’t.

“It was hideous, walking around St. Tropez with that thing,” she said.

Ms. Toboroff got to grousing about the problem with her St. Tropez-based friend and now co-investor Cristiane Quezel, who, it turns out, spends a lot of time in Africa.

The problem is a lot worse there, Ms. Quezel reported. Thus the idea was born. And it was nudged a bit forward when Ms. Toboroff couldn’t sleep one night and spotted the advertisement.

Ms. Toboroff said the company’s marketing experts have reported that they found there was no other company with patent on the idea, and running an existing business – despite the fact that “I would have thought there was.”

“Right now I have a holding application for a patent,” she said. For the same $10,000 (split 50/50 with Ms. Quezel, making Ms. Toboroff’s stake actually only $5,000) the company has presented her with a full color brochure and reported that it has sent it out to prospective investors.

“Also I can go out on my own and look for my own manufacturers, and I wouldn’t have to give them (the product development company) a cent,” she said.

Right now, she said, she is content to sit and wait to see what the product development company comes up with.

But if it takes too long, Ms. Toboroff is not without wealthy friends, here in New York, and in St. Tropez, where her skin color changes constantly.