i was in colorado this week again for work. which is not notable in any way except for the fact that 1. colorado is a lot warmer in the summer than sf, and 2. i’m back now and therefore now colder.
one thing that i did think about was soap. not soap in the “fight club-tyler durden excuses for making homemade explosives” soap, but more in the “man this hotel soap is a cheap piece of shit” soap. so cheap that i didn’t even bother opening the ones in the bathroom but instead used some body gel that i had in my toiletry kit.
hmc went to lush recently and bought us some fancy smelly top shelf soaps, and i’ve been puzzling over these as well. certainly the expectation is that the ingredients are of much higher quality and there’s less soap “filler” (what is that, exactly? dirt?), all of which justifies you paying almost an order of magnitude more than the bar of dial you’d get at slaveway.
what’s funny to me is that along with all of this, you end up buying soap in large unwieldy and oddly shaped bricks that have jutting edges and pointy parts. this is supposed to convey a sense of hand-made craftsmanship, to assure you that these bars are carefully constructed by a soap craftsman for you in particular. it’s like you know someone who makes soap and they gave you a bar. but you paid them a lot of money for it. and they won’t let you come to their house.
isn’t this a little backwards? why does the “cheap” soap have nice rounded edges, and the “fancy” soap have pointy edges? decades of progress since the industrial revolution are suddenly ground to a halt because rounded edges are no longer seen as luxurious? how did everything get turned around?
it used to be that machine-made things were actually a mark of quality, that to be able to afford things made by others was a privilege of status, instead of having to wear clothes mom sewed from a pattern or use some item that we had to construct ourselves.
yet now machine made is bad, and homemade is good. witness this manifesto:
maybe it’s all just about rounded soap. if i’m paying that much for some soap, can i not have pointy edges? enough with the faux-homemade already.
Posted at July 1, 2005 8:28 AMyou should craft a soap de-edger.
out of a knife and, uh, water.
Posted by: xz at July 4, 2005 12:04 PMI can tell you why Lush’s soaps are chunky it’s cause they make it in these huge blocks or wheels and then hack off a chunk that you buy.
I agree the rounder edges can be nicer but they just don’t feel natural and realistically, I’m not sure how in a home soap business you could make it round without using smaller moulds which means more process or by using each bar of soap a bit and wasting some just to get it round!
The thing that bugs me is when the soap artisan decides to use twiggy bits in the soap that are scratchy and eventually come out and clog the drain. What’s with that?
big hugs,
*s*
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