I just wanted some soap. How hard could it be? You go to the store, find the soap, buy it and leave.
But no. You can’t do that anymore.
Okay, I’ll admit that there was a little more to it than that. But just a little. I was looking, when I visited the supermarket last week, for liquid bath soap. One of the few positive developments of the last 40 years is the availability of soap in a bottle—it practically eliminates the soap scum problem, it travels well, and you never have the issue of what to do with the last half-millimeter-thick sliver of soap. So that is what I use in the shower.
Predictably, as soon as liquid bath soap was introduced, the people who are in charge of engineering our demise began the process of developing 12,000 variations on the theme, all of which were worse than the original. Thus, any visit to the soap aisle quickly became a needle-in-a-haystack exercise. If you had the patience to sift through the scents—the mountain breeze, the lavender and chamomile, the lily of the valley, and every fruit combination known to man—you might eventually find something labeled, simply, “liquid bath soap,” or, more commonly, “body wash.”
I did eventually identify the exact spot in the store where I could find plain, unscented liquid bath soap, at about half the price of the girly stuff. Thus, for a few years, everything was fine.
Of course, that could last only as long as no one else noticed it. Apparently, some marketing genius at the soap company recently discovered, to his or her horror, that they were still selling unscented liquid soap at a reasonable price, and that was the end of that.
Which, presumably, is why the colorless, unscented bath soap in the white bottle was gone, and in its place I found two varieties of scented soap at almost twice the price: “whipped cocoa” and “candy apple.”
Whipped cocoa. Sometimes I think about just going to bed, pulling the covers up, and waiting it out.
I checked the shelf for alternatives. “Swiss vanilla.” Well, why not? You can smell like chocolate one day and vanilla the next. But not just vanilla—Swiss vanilla. I’d never heard of it. How is it different from, say, French vanilla, and how many people would know the difference?
“Sun-ripened apricot.” All right. Let’s assume that, for whatever reason, you want to smell like an apricot. Understanding, then, that they’re not really putting apricot pulp into the bottle—you do know that, right?—do you think the factory in New Jersey that mixes the chemicals to create these fragrances has perfected its process to the point of distinguishing between a sun-ripened apricot and, say, a heat lamp-ripened apricot? Do we need to know how the imaginary apricots were ripened, or even that they were ripened? Wouldn’t “apricot” tell us everything we need to know? Or is there an unripe apricot fragrance? Over-ripe apricot? Out of curiosity, I scanned the shelf for rotten-apricot-scented soap, but found none.
“Lavender and twilight jasmine.” I have no idea what that means.
“Cafe latte.” Are you serious? It’s bad enough that my breath smells like coffee all morning—do I really need to fill my pores with it?
“Sweet pea and violet.” Are there people who want to smell like peas?
I realize, of course, that the scent doesn’t really linger to the point that anyone is likely to notice. Why, then, do I care? Well, first, there’s the principle—I decline to be lured into buying something with an unnecessary, fake fragrance just so I can pay more for it. I use soap to remove sweat, leftover food, and dead bugs from my skin. Whipped cocoa has no role to play in the process.
Second, and more pragmatically, I still cling to the hope that, at some time in the near future, there will again arrive in my bathroom—perhaps even in my shower—someone on whom I would want to make a favorable impression. Call me insecure, but the impression I would like to make is unlikely to be facilitated by a bottle of candy apple body wash.
It has been observed, by people who observe such things, that I am not a quick decision maker, that I am more of a thinker than a doer. Under similar circumstances—when soap is needed, but there are no acceptable options on the shelf—others might settle for what is available, or, if truly ambitious, go to another store. I, instead, followed my life’s creed: “When in doubt, do nothing.” I returned, empty-handed, to my soapless house, passively confident, like Wilkins Micawber, that “something will turn up.”
In the bathroom, I pawed through the stuff on the shelves until I found a long-forgotten bar of soap that had shown up in a gift bag or a Christmas stocking, or perhaps had been removed from a hotel room. (If I bring my own soap, it’s okay to leave with the bar they provided for me, right?)
“Olive oil and green tea.” Sigh. No better than the rest, but at least I didn’t pay for it. It appears that I’m destined, despite my efforts, to smell like a hot beverage for the next month or two.
Or maybe I’ll just take a nap.
