Musings on Soap

Yep, you read that right. Soap. I started thinking about it several weeks ago, when my mom got this gross perfume-y soap for the bathroom. I honestly don't know how people think stuff like that smells good. Fortunately, I was allergic to the artificial fragrance in this soap, which lingered on my hands far longer than it should have. Since I already have indoor allergies, every time I would blow my nose or even touch my face, the scent from the soap would cause my allergies to flare up.

So, to avoid this complication I started using bar soap. It's pretty amazing how long a bar of soap lasts compared to a container of soft-soap. And before I started using bar soap, it never really occurred to me how incredibly useless those stupid little plastic soft-soap dispensers are! I'd always advocated buying the large refill bottles instead of buying individual dispenser bottles whenever one ran out, simply because a large bottle filled with a lot of soap requires less packaging than several small dispenser bottles. But no plastic soap bottles are even better! Why on earth did we as a society move away from bar soap? And how did the plastic soap dispensers get so entrenched in the American household? Simply put, it's a perfect example of how wasteful our consumer culture is.

As an added benefit, most soft-soaps have antibiotics in them, whereas bar soaps typically do not as far as I know. So phasing out the plastic dispenser bottles would also result in phasing out unnecessary antibiotics (which contributes to rampant antibiotic resistant bacterial strains, and according to the Hygiene Hypothesis results in a less robust immune system).

It's such an incredibly obvious (and remarkably painless) lifestyle change that I really can't believe why it isn't being implemented in the mainstream (or even suggested by environmental groups).

Just think about how many of those stupid plastic dispenser bottles are in a landfill for each person in this country...