Necessities
I hung out yesterday with a group of girls I haven't seen in awhile. We talked about Fix for a bit, and one of them asked about "necessities." "I mean, you've bought stuff from the drugstore, right?" Well, no.
Yes, I've deemed soap and shampoo and deodorant necessities. But let's be honest: how many bars of soap or bottles of shampoo and lotion are moldering away in the dark corners of your bathroom? Girls receive bath crap by the ton from coworkers or people who don't know them very well. Or there's the big bottle of lotion I bought that smells too fruity and doesn't work as well as some other brand. But I don't want to throw it away, because it's still "good"! And it can't go to charity because it's opened and that's a lot of effort for a bottle of lotion/five bars of soap/travel shampoo anyway. I'm writing this not to castigate anyone for clutter or waste but to point out that for a lot of people, maybe most of the people I know and love, soap isn't a necessity -- exactly the right kind is. We all have things like this: toothpaste, tissues, socks, underwear, etc. Lucky for me soap is totally negotiable and our hostess Shanan unloaded a bunch of high-end beauty products on me. Not sure I'm so flexible on deodorant, though - and I'm about to run out.
Megan Metcalf
3 Comments
Reader Comments (3)
Does the average jane in Chad have soap? Does she
stink? Many people does she share a room with? Do they
stink? How does she rank soap on in the hierarchy of
her desires--above or below jewelry or beer or a trip
to town? Would she want biodegradable soap? What
about the average joe?
I read, I think in New Scientist, that some researcher thinks that daughters have become alienated from their fathers in part at least because they smell too good! In other words, men who bathe and deodorize themselves to excess (most of us) mask all those healthful pheronomes that transmit so much useful information between people.
Since this is plausible and I can be a sucker for a theory, I decided to give up on deodorant for a while, for my two young daughters' sake. There is no way to know whether this will help or hurt them -- this is a classic uncontrolled experiement, and they may just think I stink -- but I can't stand the way most "product" smells anyway, and I do think natural human odor is underrated.
I've become way less foo foo and basic in the soaps & hair care department. As far as deoderant goes we've switched to the crystal type. One has lasted us two years! My husband and I share these products so now the bathroom seems bigger.