Okay, maybe not, bar soap was kind of a pain. It was great for about the first 60% of the bar, but it goes downhill from there. After a certain point, it didn’t matter what color the bar of soap had originally been, it eventually turned into a white lump of goo. Now, I may be old fashioned, but I was raised to believe that if you spend a fair amount of time rubbing white goo on yourself, you’ve made some bad choices in life. So I guess, no, bar soap is not really the culprit here. I think my issue with bar soap is that it harkens back to a time when men didn’t worry about dry skin.
Back when soap came in bar form, dry skin was not something that men gave thought to. Okay, maybe if you had skin that looked like a Galapagos iguauna during the molting season, you’d go to a doctor and get some salve to get rid of it. Primarily, soap was used to wash the stink off. Ivory, Dial, Lifebuoy, Zest, they were all for just to make you clean and keep you from smelling bad. And maybe if you were really worried about the funk, you’d get something with a little fragrance, like Irish Spring, but even then it was in a very manly way. The Irish Spring commercials alway had some guy with a sweater about 2 inches thick and surrounded by a couple of voluptuous red-headed Irish lassies. And he pull out a knife and whittle off a big hunk of the bar, so you could see just how good it smelled.
But, now I’m expected to exfoliate. My liquid soap is infused with what looks like grains of brightly red and blue sand to help slough off the dead skin, but I’m always worried that I won’t quite rinse thorough enough and I’ll be picking pieces of red and blue grit out of the corner of my eye. That and there’s nothing like getting to rub a nice gritty substance on my scrotum every morning.
Links related to this post
Dial Blue Grit, this is the stuff
Irish Spring Soap Commercial (1980)