Soap Complaints In My House

Written August 2009 by Bradford Schmidt, my husband of 14 years. He writes two blogs, Bone In The Fan, The Meatist and writes for the newspaper, The Florida Weekly. Follow him on Twitter! @BradfordSchmidt He's funny...

Soap Duds

In which I’m lazy and use an obvious title that rhymes with a common plural noun.

You’d think that being a partner in a company that makes fresh, handmade soaps and body and bath products would pay off in some way. That the years of work, the thousands of dollars invested, the cabinets filled with awesome soap that Joanna made would be worth a little something.

And yet.

And yet, I still found myself in the shower tonight asking Joanna “Jo, do we have any soaps that don’t hurt?”

Really. There are a half dozen soaps in our shower, none of which are made by Joanna, all of which are some kind of exfoliating bar (if you define exfoliating as abrading various parts of your body). Look: I’m as happy as the next guy to have a little texture in my soap (the soap I use for soaping, that is), but what kind of crack-smoking psychotic makes soap with something approximating glass shards added as an exfoliant?

And don’t get me started on the little loofah soap dealie. You’ve seen ‘em: slices of soap with loofah inside them. Made by jamming a loofah into what’s effectively a fat tennis ball can, then melting and pouring translucent soap into it. Let it harden, pop it out, slice it up, and you have a delightful looking piece of soap that’s utterly useless unless you’re a masochist.

See, the soap melts away, leaving the loofah raised up above the surface, but not soft at all – so you can’t use it as soap, you can’t use it as loofah, but you can use it at Gitmo to replace waterboarding.

Looks like a slice of tomato. Feels like a giant steel cat tongue.

So Joanna finally handed me a piece of soap (though inexplicably still not one she made) without rocks, sand, glass or hardened loofah in it, and it stank like a South Florida grandmother with a bad perfume addiction.

I really need to talk to Joanna about this.

(this piece was originally written on his blog. I've linked the title back to his blog)