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)

Plug For The Man

As some of you know, my husband, Brad, writes Bone In The Fan and recently wrote a funny post about the Quizno's pizza commercials. If you are not easily offended hop over and go have a read. I mentioned it on Twitter, so some of you have already had a read.

:)

"David Archuleta Makes Me Throw Up In My Mouth"

If you want to read a very funny take on last night's American Idol Finals Magic, read here.

Racing Motorcycle Ultimate Fighter Soap

Carol Ochs of Simply Soap outdid herself this time!  My husband wrote an excellent soap review on her Wylde Jasmine Orange Blossom Faerie soap, but as far as Brad was concerned, it should have been called Orange Racing Motorcycle Ultimate Fighter Soap.  Apparently, the soap was too cool for its given name.

I am guessing that Carol was so happy with his review that she sent us more of the same soap. She changed the name on this package for Brad, wrapped the bar in denim and decorated the package with boxing gloves, a screw and a helmet.  Finally the soap came in a handmade jute pouch. Very manly!

Brad took a shower with the soap last night and announced to me, "Yep, that's the stuff!"

Carol, you are very talented.  And funny.  We wish you the best and hope you sell oodles of the Orange Racing Motorcycle Ultimate Fighter soap.

There's A Man In My Shower! Guest Soap Review

I've been after my husband for quite a while to contribute to one or both of my blogs.  I love his writing style and humor (anyone who's read a label on one of our products has had a small sampling) and he finally contributed a hilarious review of one of the soaps I received.  This should also give you a slight idea of what it's like at our house both in terms of living here with him and showering here with a soap blogger and product manufacturer.  Enjoy!

I'm not a soap guy.  Which is not to say I don't use soap.  Were that the case I'm fairly sure I'd be single and playing a lot of online games right now, and while online gaming is probably just fine, I prefer the company of my wife most of the time.  So clearly soap has advantages over, say, plain water and cheap deodorant and I am happy to enjoy them.

But I'm still not a soap guy.  I don't think about soap except when I grab a bar in the shower or at a sink, I don't care how it looks, and I give no thought at all to how it's made.  As for smell, well I prefer coconut or citrus, but don't much care as long as it fits my personal critical soap criteria, which I present for you here:

1 - My soap must not stink.  In practice this means it can't reek like cheap cologne, a urinal puck, or both.  Irish Spring for example makes me gak - so that should give you some idea of what I'm talking about.

2 - My soap must wash off cleanly.  Feeling like I've been dipped in partially hydrogenated soybean oil just pisses me off.  Ivory feels like it never comes off (99 44/100% pure WHAT, exactly?) and plenty of other soaps make me feel so oily I just want to grab a thong and hit the beach in St. Tropez.

3 - My soap must have slip and the slip has gotta last.  I like my long lasting slip and that's all I'm going to say on the matter so move along to number 4.

4 - My soap must not be crunchy.  Now I'm not talking about physically crunchy here, I'm talking about the smell.  And I know you might think this belongs under criterion 1, but I feel so strongly about it I'm granting it its own number.  Here's the thing:  If I take a shower and end up smelling like I just stepped out of a 1967 be-in, someone's gonna pay.  You'd think that's not a real risk, I mean you can certainly smell soap before rubbing it all over your body, right?  Not always, not in my house.  With Joanna doing her soap blog there are an awful lot of bars of soap kicking around my place, and I'm in real danger of grabbing something that smells like it just fell out of the man-purse of some dude named Sunbeam who just left his VW bus running out front so that he wouldn't have to push-start it again after he ran up to hip us to the groovy jam band that he and Jasmine are going to drop acid and dig from the hill just outside of the festival because they can't get tickets since he just spent his last couple of bucks on a new pair of Birkenstocks and some really righteous hash.  On more than one occasion Joanna has had to respond to me yelling from the shower "DUDE! Is there any soap that doesn't smell like a hippy?!  Please?!"  Yes, I call Joanna dude sometimes, and it's because she's so cool, and if you knew her you would too, so drop it.

So I'm assuming you get the point: I'm not a big soap guy and have fairly simple, though rigid rules on the subject.  By the way, while I may well be an opinionated ass, I'm also a live and let live kinda guy.  If you like the crunchy smells, more power to you!  Just please don't expect me to pick you up if you're hitchhiking.

All of which I assume makes it rather surprising that I'm writing a review of a soap at all, much less one called...er.....well we'll get to that in a moment.

So I'm in the shower faced with way too many soaps, none of which are any of my standard go-to bars and I have to make a choice.  The selection process traditionally goes something like this:  pick up a random bar, give a cautious sniff, then either a) put it back immediately and rinse my hand off while I mumble about tie-dye shirts and looms, grab another bar and try again or  b) say something along the lines of "this'll do" and start washing.  I had no idea that thinking "holy crap this smells great" was even a choice.

But after using the soap in question (the name of which was a mystery to me until today), I have to admit that there is more to soap than just being good enough to do the job without bumming me out scent-wise.  At any rate, here's how it performs under my 4 point check list:

1 - Does is stink?  Nope, just the opposite.  The smell of this bad boy is perfect.  It's citrus: not too strong, not too weak, not too sweet.  Made me actually pay attention to it and say "heyyyyy,  niiiiiiice."

2 - Does it wash off cleanly?  Yup.  No film or greasy scuzz whatsoever.

3 - Got slip?  Check.  Slides all over nice and easy, but not so out of control that I kept dropping it, which makes it perfect for me as well as a good prison soap .

4 - Is it crunchy?  In smell, no.  In feel, no.  In name.....oh yeah.  But don't let that put you off.  I know I would have, but I'm too opinionated for my own good sometimes.

So it passes my personal tests, but why write a review?  Because it ROCKS.  I was seriously bummed out when the last sliver disappeared from the shower, and now that I know what soap can be like, other soaps just suck.  So it's a good news bad news thing - loved the soap, but now I'm spoiled and whiny.

If you've stayed with me for this long, I suppose I owe you the name of the soap now.  Caveat: I didn't actually see the label, so I'm going to have to take Joanna's word for this.   The manufacturer is Simply Soap, and the soap in question is called Wylde (yes, spelled like it's from a Renaissance Faire) Jasmine Orange Blossom Faerie Soap.  Or so Joanna says - as far as I'm concerned it's called Orange Motorcycle Racing Ultimate Fighter Soap. 

 

So buy some.  Use some.  And let the man in your life use some, because he'll dig it.  Just remove the label first, because he won't touch it if you don't.