Thursday, December 11, 2008

The Campaign for Real Soap

Matthew Parris:

In the shower yesterday, I was struggling with some idiotic substance called “shower scrub”. (It was in a bottle that you couldn't hold, squeeze and collect from, while at the same time trying to wash yourself with the other hand. You lost most of it down the plughole.) And I remembered the late Alan Coren's column about things invented in the wrong order.
So here, Alan, is another for your list: that brilliant new invention for the shower: a washing agent in solid form; self-cleaning; economical; easily handled; no caps to lift or seal; no packaging but a discardable paper wrap; unable to be spilt down the plughole; and giving an all-day perfume to your bathroom! It's called “soap”.

Norm:

Apart from being handier than the alternatives, soap also has more admirable metaphysical properties: its solidity is reassuringly definite, giving users a thorough sense of the objectivity of the world; and it looks like what it is, rather than like any number of possible substances.

I completely agree.

And what’s more, without good old-fashioned bars of soap, this awful, awful joke wouldn’t work:

Two nuns are having a bath. One says: “Where’s the soap?” The other replies: “Yes, it does, doesn’t it?”

3 comments:

Niall Smith said...

My father used to be an engineer for a firm that made one of the first radox bottles that you could hang upside down in the shower and use.

I quite liked them. You could leave them upside down with the cap off and it wouldn't leak. Much.

We had some of the early prototypes in the bathroom.

I think the point is that a lot of work goes into these things and i am being overly, pointlessly sensitive.

Matt M said...

I'd take shower gel over soap.

I've never found mysterious hairs or greyish scum in shower gel.

The only annoying thing is that they (apparently) design the bottles so that you can never get the last bit out, forcing you to move onto the next one before its properly run out.

Sam said...

Lush do "shampoo in a bar". Yes, a solid bar of shampoo. Its genius - and it works too. It cleans and seems to last much longer than its liquid sister.

Thus, I have eliminated all shower related soapy liquids and related packaging.

...yes, I am probably a little too excited about this.