Wednesday 11 March 2015

Soap

From the BBC News website comes this disappointingly concise piece on a subject that was surely worth a couple of thousand more words - the deplorable ascendancy of liquid soap over old-fashioned bars of the stuff. The BBC News piece does effectively marshal the principal arguments in favour of the soap bar, all of which are strong and cogent, but I would have preferred a deal more depth, a range of supportive testimony, and perhaps a visit to a supermarket or pharmacy to inspect the situation and gather a little vox pop. In my experience it's becoming increasingly hard to find a bar of soap - certainly anything beyond a handful of brands - whereas the liquid stuff dominates the shelves with an ever-expanding array of scents, colours, antibacterial claims and other gimmicks. There is of course one place where it is possible to find a truly dizzying range of solid soaps - the unaccountably successful chain that calls itself Lush. I am not, however, tempted by their foul-smelling, candy-coloured, randomly shaped chunks of whatever the heck their stuff is made of. It will indeed by a cold day in Hell when I set foot in one of their ghastly shops. By the way, whatever happened to soap on a rope?  

3 comments:

  1. The scent of Lush is a pollutant of the first order. I even got a frightful blast of it once while floating through the otherwise idyllic setting of a Venetian canal. Good soaps, on the other hand — Provencal soaps, preferably — are one of life's greatest pleasures.

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  2. Yes, I was appalled to spot a branch of Lush in Venice - and you're so right about the pleasures of a good bar of soap. They order this matter better in France...

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  3. Delingpole wrote a piece in the Speccie about why Aldi represented all that was good and true in shopping, and Lush all that bad and false.

    I've never actually crossed the threshold into Lush. There is an invisible man-barrier in the doorway.

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