Afew weeks ago I listened to some of my friends talk about soap for what seemed a really, really long time. While I wouldn’t have expected soap to be so fertile a topic, it appears that this is yet another huge cultural phenomenon about which I am totally ignorant. It seems that today’s women, and possibly a few of today’s men, have gone crazy over soap. Specifically, the kind that comes from Bath & Body Works.
I suppose it would be more accurate to say “body wash products” than “soap” because there is, apparently, a big difference. Some of you may actually remember bars of soap, those rectangular chunks of lye that used to be sold in small cardboard boxes with names like Safeguard, Zest and Irish Spring. Commercials once claimed that “Safeguard is the smallest soap in the house” because every member of the family used it.
But now soap has changed along with everything else. No longer is there such a thing as a community bar of soap. Now, just as every member of family has his or her own car, television, cell phone and stock broker, every person in the family will also have his or her own soap. And it used to be that one bar of soap would get every part of the body clean. How naive we were back then, and now heaven forbid you mess with those 48 bottles of Bath & Body Works products in a woman’s bathroom.
If you visit the Bath & Body Works store in the mall, you will immediately discover why Safeguard has gone the way of vinyl records, rotary-dial phones and small trucks. There are literally thousands of different soaps, lotions, creams, body scrubs, ointments, exfoliants, aromatherapies, moisturizers and other products available. Compared to the feel of “Green Clover and Aloe Body Lotion,” using Irish Spring is like bathing with a Brillo pad. And while a nice box of Zest will set you back about 75 cents, be prepared to fill out a credit application when you head to Bath &Body Works.
What makes this all so strange is that body wash is now considered a romantic gift for a wife or girlfriend. This cannot be right. It seems downright insulting. What a bottle of body scrub says to your beloved is, “Happy birthday, dear. You need a bath. Maybe some strongly scented soap will help.” It’s the equivalent of saying to a friend, “Would you like a mint?” (Translation: I just tripped over your breath).
I once really got in trouble in this regard. A few years ago my mother did my holiday shopping, and she got my sister-in-law a cosmetics gift set. On Christmas morning, when my sister-in-law opened her present from me, the gift set contained a jar of “bust-firming cream.” Now that is not the kind of thing you want to give your sister-in-law. Or anybody, for that matter. I now do my own shopping.
And to make matters worse, these creams and soaps now come in about 800 different scents. Popular items this season include “Spicy Gingerbread Lip Gloss,” “Twisted Peppermint Lotion” and “Wickedly Hot Chocolate Body Scrub.” So let me get this straight — people are now using soap that smells like food. Stupid me; I always thought a person used soap to get rid of the smell of food. Now everything is backwards. In the past, a typical food-and-soap conversation might sound like this:
Guy One: “Aw, man . . . I just sat in potato salad.”
Guy Two: “Dude — you need a bath.”
But now, you are likely to overhear something like this:
Woman One: “Hey . . . you smell like potato salad.”
Woman Two: “I know. Isn’t it great? I just got out of the shower.”
Woman One: “Does it also come in a moisturizer?”
