A few months ago, on a two day business trip, I forgot to pack my can of shaving gel. I realized this the following morning in my hotel room when I was ready to head for a shave. I could have run down to a nearby store and purchased shaving cream, but I didn’t. Instead I built up a lather using the small complimentary soap that the hotel had provided, spread it over my stubbed face and put my razor to work. Did my razor complaint about missing its daily shaving mate? Not really. At least it didn’t make me feel that way. Did the many people I met that day notice the difference? I don’t think so. At least nobody walked up to me saying “Oh.., you shaved with soap today?”

That day, that tiny little soap had quadrupled as handwash, facewash, bodywash, and as shaving cream too. I would have promoted it as shampoo too, but then the hotel had provided me with a tiny bottle of shampoo that I didn’t want to let go unused. But as I was admiring that tini-tiny soap for its accomplishments, my mind raced back in flashback mode to a time around a decade ago. I was young and naïve then, and I had committed the blunder of washing my face with a handwash liquid. This was at an acquaintance’s place (in the USA), in whose bathroom was a nice looking bottle which oozed out a sweet smelling milky white soapy liquid. The bottle even had a picture of some fruit on it (must have been papaya), and I had used the contents of the bottle to cleanse my face. Well nothing happened to my face, if that’s what you are thinking – no rashes, no redness, no blisters of any sort. My face just got cleaner, and smelt nicer too. But when my acquaintance found out that I had used that handwash liquid to clean my face, she freaked out. “How could you use it on your face, that’s handwash !!”. Her expressions were as bizarre as if I had just washed my face with a toilet cleaner. “Isn’t it soap?” was what I said in my defense, but all I got back was a ‘Duh…how dumb’ kind of an expression.

Well you can’t blame me for what happened back then. As I said, I was naïve and my knowledge on toiletries was fairly limited. Soaps, shampoos, and shaving creams were the only three broader categories that I knew existed. I didn’t know of the existence of the finer nuances in the form of handwash, facewash, face scrub, foot cleansers, shampoo, and of course bodywash (to clean up the remaining parts of the human anatomy). But I am well educated now. Now I know that these products exist. But at times I wonder on why can’t the bodywash liquid be doubled as handwash? Would hands be any less clean if washed with the bodywash liquid? Never mind. I still use my red colored lifebuoy soap for most of my cleansing purposes and I have no complaints with it. But still some questions remain unanswered – would it really make a difference if one actually had a complete shower with just handwash soap or with shampoo for that matter? - And no you wouldn’t have hair growing all over your body just because you scrubbed yourself with shampoo :) (if that’s what you are thinking).

Shopping for toiletries is yet another complex thing. There is so much variety out there to clean you up, that at times you are really tempted to get dirty (no double meanings here.. :) plzzzz). But when it comes to brand loyalty, toiletries are the worst products to be loyal to. The moment you start showing a little attachment to a brand, there comes a ‘new and improved’ version of the same and that too at a discounted price, only to make you feel cheated. Seriously, I mean it. When something like this happens I get the feeling that all these days I was being duped into using a product that was not just inferior in quality, but also overpriced. It’s like heartbreak, and I have been through it often.

But the most complex of them all is the shaving cream/gel/foam and I completely blame Gillette for it. They have taken a simple thing like shaving to a whole new level of complexities. I will blog about it soon.