Rant. Liquid soap
Of all the things that purport to be marker of the moment the decadent West finally slipped into irrevocable decline, the advent of liquid soap is the best candidate.
For 5,000 years, we managed – nay, thrived – on the simple admixture of alkali, fat and water (dried out a bit and cut into chunks) as a cleansing agent. We called it bar soap. Or, more simply still, soap.
Until about fifteen years ago. Then marketing mavens realised that, if you started pushing the idea that soap bars were unhygienic (the last person’s germs transferring to the next user), naff (your granny uses it!) and harsh on the skin, you could flog much more profitable bottles of liquid soap to fools. A dollop of gloop costs at least four times as much as the 0.35g of solid stuff required to wash your hands.
Every pump testifies to the gullibility of man. A moment’s clear, rational thought tells you that none of liquid soap’s claims could be true. If germs were transmitted by soap, any family with a teenage boy and a shared shower would have died out long ago. But studies show that half the population now believe a
block of Wright’s coal tar is a potential death trap. And we have not suddenly, after five millennia, developed tissue-paper skin. If you have, you can buy glycerine soap. Still solid; still cheap; still not a shrine to stupidity.
Naff? Naffness is in the eye of the beholder. You could argue nothing is naffer than cravenly and moronically abandoning a super-efficient, tried and tested technology for something that does the job less well (shifting the sticky residue of liquid soap is like having a second job) for more money.
And finally – even if you don’t know that the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich found liquid soap to have a carbon footprint 25 per cent greater than bar soap – it’s so obviously, self-evidently wasteful. A bottle lasts seconds; a bar months. A bar is a simple, satisfying piece of old-school perfection whose reputation has been sullied by dirty marketing tricks. Time to clean this mess up.