There is many o' time I have been accused of using way too much cleaning and/or body product. Shampoo, hand soap, liquid hand soap, toilet paper, shaving cream, sun screen, hair stiffener, laundry detergent — the list is long.
According to the Hygiene Pope there is a correct amount of product to use for each task. I ask how she knows this, maybe I missed something in home economics or health class, she shrugs and says, "I just do". It would seem that her Holiness was curiously born with the knowledge.
Myself I think it's all in relation to size. I am bigger and to therefore require (or want to use) more. You should see the tiny dollops of hair soap St. Storey hath deemed necessary for proper hair cleansing and scalp conditioning. Think the area the size of a penny, whereas I'm going for two silver dollars, three quarters and a nickel.
In nine years of blissful marriage, I have learned to live with rationing. I've found it helps to pretend that we're still at war with Germany — that every ounce of product I use keeps us further from victory. One time I imagined that we lived in communist Romania but that lead to day-dreaming about bread lines, Stalin, and tanks, but that didn't make for a very pleasant morning.
More importantly, what the hell is up with soap that no longer smells like soap? What idiot thought it would be a good idea to put fragrance in cleaning products?
It was one thing when you wanted your towels to smell like a spring day, but quite another when every damn cleaning product smells like lavender. And I know it's not just my home. I've been out there, in your homes and I've seen how bad this trend has penetrated the every home in America, and parts of Canada, the good parts, the parts on the west coast.
The other day I took my personal Pontiff to a bed and breakfast. Upon entering the room a strong waft of lavender reached through and uppercut me in the jaw — I reeled back trying to find a pocket of non-scented air, weak from the mighty blow.
Lavender! It's everywhere! My wife would sleep in fields of it if she could. Almost every cleaning product, personal and industries, is lavender. Thank heavens the people at Charmin have had the good sense to keep my toilet paper plain.
Whatever happened to the basics? When I go the car wash they at least show some restraint by offering only four choices: vanilla, pine, citrus (formally called orange), or none at all, which is the best choice in my humble opinion.
The American car wash is the last place on earth where a guy has the option of not smelling like a candle. I'd almost considered changing careers until tonight; while shopping for laundry detergent I came across a new scent, Mountain Clean. I know my Maytag Neptunes will thank me later.
If we must live in a scented world, then I think it's high time companies like Arm & Hammer started making products targeted towards the clean conscious male. I'm talking scents like: Offroad Morning, Fresh Cut Lawn, Fall Stadium, Red Dawn and New Powerbook. It's a whole new line of products that clean with smells that motivate. Now that's a cleaning product I can get behind.
Join the fray by reading through and commenting at the end.
Funny, I was just thinking today that the people at Glade need to come up with something a little more masculine, as I disassembled my Glade Wisp with the ultrasonic vaporizer thingy. The Wisp is the only air freshener gadget that's ever appealed to my inner geek enough for me to take it apart.
I like your Fresh Cut Lawn idea, and would like to suggest Sawdust as well. I love that smell.
New powerbook would be the best I think!
I too use a bit more shampoo/cleaning supplies than most people I think. Being as I am one foot taller than my significant other I think it is reasonable that I use more cleaning supplies and eat more.
But I could be wrong.
About the world smelling like lavendar, I think that (albeit a bit shovanist) most cleaning supplies are only marketed towards women. I mean how often do you see a guy doing dishes on a commercial on TV? Never. The reason: tradition? target-market?
I don't know.
I, for reasons I can't explain, have lost most of my sense of smell.
But....
Sign me up.
Hmmm...I second sawdust — I'll add cedar. And yes, I too amd tired of everything scenting up everything else. Since I still live at home, my mom puts scented stuff everywhere. I mean, don't get me wrong, I love certain scents but when it overpowers you as you enter places it's freakin' annoying. When I was young I would go to the mall with my parents and stand outside as my mom went into Kirkland's, Hallmark, and any of those bath shops. What women don't realize is that strong scents give people headaches — and no scent is worse than pumpkin. Not only do I hate halloween due to the tackiness of the event, but I also hate it on the grounds that all the stores begin to put in stuff that smells like "pumpkin", only it doesn't really smell like pumpkin. It smells — and looks — like fermented puke in a jar.
You know they do make things like baking soda that remove smells from the air. Maybe we should just line our noses with that as we walk around. The only problems I can see, besides inhalation of said soda, is that cops will certainly become a greater nuisance.
have you considered (despite the obvious bad song reference) the fragrance "summer rain". I think that there is a possible target market for "asterixair fresheners"...
Word-out to all my hommies in Bucharest (Romania)! :-)
For the record, it was Hungary which got invaded by the soviets in the '50s (was it the '60s?) because of an uprising.
Romania just stood there and pretty much took it up the ***, unfortunatelly. Otherwise, the bread lines, starvation and political police+torture you're spot on.
You forget "New Car." Preferably, the "Leather Interior" version, although I could also live with "Naugahyde" in a pinch.
By the way, this makes interesting reading: http://www.naugahyde.com/history.html.
They already have 'Nu Car' which doesn't really smell like a new car at all.
If I wash my hair everyday, I need a penny-sized dollop of shampoo (even for my long hair). If I wash every other day then I need two dollops. Maybe it's a woman-thing that we notice these things? I love the smell of plain soap on a man; I do not like the smell of lavender on anybody. Planethalder.
I second "new powerbook."
"and parts of Canada, the good parts, the parts on the west coast."
You were probably still reeling from that lavendar blast when you wrote the above nonsense. Ya... that's it... must have been the over powering upper-cut of lavendar that did it. The WEST Coast gave BIRTH to all this scented this and scented that crap.
I'll back up your reasoning on the larger size - more soap (or more food) reasoning as I'm a little over 6'4" and 200+ pounds myself.
As far as sents go, I have been finding coconut scented bodily cleaning products everywhere in the home recently. I have never liked coconut - not to eat, not to smell, and certainly not to wash with. Yet, that is all I seem to find. On a more posative note, I buy my own deodorent and have most recently been using Arm & Hammer's 'unsented' variety. The stuff is great. It doesn't stink and neither do I.
I recently had to buy some laundry detergent and promtly got yelled at (Ok, so it wasn't that bad, but you get the idea) because I purchased the only one I had any care to use - 'unsented' (Sorry I forget the brand - but the stuff does exist). Something about it not being able to mask the odors. Maybe I missed something, but isn't that, in part, why we wash our clothes? To remove the odors? In any event, the same brand also offers some sort of 'mountain fresh' sent that is not to flowery and that seems to work out for a decent compromise everyone can live with. Now if we could just do the same with that coconut stuff.
Ray I'd need to see proof of your claim before I stop blaming France for this fragrant mess we're in.
Isn't Canada kind of French?
I think everything East of Vancouver become more and more French and then tapers off towards Libertarian once you hit Nova Scotia.
I believe there's a sad, scary truth that the Gregster might be overlooking here: that the unscented version of these products actually begin life as unscented (or don't smell bad). I think the ugly truth is most cleaning products, personal and industrial, are made in nasty New Jersey factories from evil chemical brews, and I think it's safe to assume they smell 'naturally' like something—and that something is probably not something you want to rub all over your body. So 'unscenting' these products is probably harder than covering up their noxious smells with vats of chemical lavender, coconut, and green apple—hence the paucity of the 'unscented' option. The scent industry is huge, secretive, nasty, and highly profitable. There's a good bit about it in Fast Food Nation on how McDonalds de-scents their hamburgers and then re-scents them with McDonalds patented burger smell (tm). Pretty disgusting all around.
I thought I remember hearing somewhere that women hold 75% of the buying power in the United States. As a result virtually every advertisement you see on TV is targeted at women.
As for me, I go to extra lengths to find the least scented cleaning products I can buy. Plus I have a dog and a cat living in my house, so most of the froofy smells go away pretty quickly. Especially when it is raining, and my dog gets wet like today.
There is a place not far from me called Norfolk Lavender (that's Norfolk - a county in the UK). They make all manner of scented things from, you've guessed it, Lavender.
I've been forced there once, it is hell on earth...
Believe it or not, they have that male-smelling crap already and that stuff is just annoying in a new way. I vote with non-scented, that sounds great. And it must be a man thing to hate scents in general - guy products like Lab have unscented versions of their aftershave lotions, deodorant, all kinds of stuff.
My wife and I don't like the idea of creating superbugs, so we try to avoid the anti-bacterial soaps, which is getting harder and harder to do. The upside is that most regular soaps have easy-to-live-with scents, like milk & honey or aloe or something. Wow, that just dropped my manly rating by 20 points.
Here's a little something to haunt you, Greg.
I apologize for your entire life, Mr. Turley, because that really sucks!
Don't get me wrong, I'm a man who likes certain scents. I think it really boils down to the fact that women think roses smell great whereas every knows they smell like "poo poo."
And I have long hair and I find a dime sized amount won't begin to even cover the outer surface of my hair. I think it depends on how much hair you have in addition to it's length. If you're a woman with long hair and you only need a dime I guarantee you have no 'body.'
Or, you could smell like a Hummer. It's got leather and tonka beans, whatever those are.
Kenneth, you actually went to a Lavendar Festival? Are you nuts? You could have at least faked a 24 flu or pretended that your cars brakes needed emergency repair...
I'm checking something here...
Greg, no no. The wife & mom-in-law went. I stayed and played Xbox w/ my brother-in-law. Festivals are great, but not when they're about ONE FREAKIN' PLANT. :)
Dunno how to formulate it, but I think there's room for the scent New Girlfriend. And who'd pass up furniture polish in the new Fresh Bacon scent?
Would folks buy Glade air freshener in Chamomile Dingleberry? If accompanied by just the right graphic (picture a water wheel, early morning) could you sell something in Old Mill Dew? Betcha could.
LQ
Just a dab of motor oil behind each ear, and the Man's Man is set.
i must comment about Charmin ... it is no longer Sacred Material. I bought a package a couple days ago (on sale! shoulda known something was up...) and much to my dismay, discovered i had purchased some moisturized, greasy, eucalyptus-infused ass-nastiness.
Greg, have your hairdresser (my wife does mine) put the 1/8" guard on the hair clippers. Then you'll only need about a dime-sized amount, every other day...
As for smells, I need you to talk to my wife. Maybe you can help to convince her that it's ok for personal products to not stink.
This is why my girlfriend teases me -- I buy the cheap **** soap from Walgreens. Not because it's 79 cents a bar -- but because IT SMELLS LIKE SOAP and not like a spring rain. You mix all these pretty scents together and eventually you come up with an evil brew that can stun a grown man sleeping in his bed soundly.
I like to imagine I'm in Gotham City on a hygiene product scare. Certain combinations can be deadly.
"I like to imagine I'm in Gotham City on a hygiene product scare. Certain combinations can be deadly."
That's too close to reality for me. The other day I had to mix lavendar and rosemary in the shower. The wife found me an hour later, flat on the floor, cat's licking hy hair. It took a few iced lattes before I was back on my feet.
How about a girl that never been in a forest, but uses forest-scented shampoo.
"Daddy, the forest smells of shampoo!"
http://www.koert.com/work/shampoowoods/
(ok, it's not so relevant. But I thought about it reading this entry and, you just have to agree, the web is all about linking. )
Lone female standing up and stating that scented stuff does in fact give me a headache, roses smell horrible and I like the smell of pine, cedar, oranges and, yes, sawdust. If I can smell you before you enter the room or for a full ten minutes after you have left, lay off the smelly stuff. Yuck.
Whaaaaa? Rambo whoooo?
*drools over hl2*
I too have braved through the menacing, tear wrenching power of the lavender scented toiletry accessories, and lived to tell about it. The rise of this intoxicating substance is unmistakable; its scent easily pierces the fresh air and is detected quite effortlessly by a quick and perceptive rise of the human snout.
At first, the scent seems quite harmless. Innocent. Maybe, even pleasant.
Unfortunately, having not experienced the full and unadulterated power of lavender before in your quite uneventful life, you will probably neglect to do the only thing that could possibly rescue you from the impending deadly onslaught.
Run as fast as humanly possible.
By the time you realize its immediate presence, it is too late. You will suddenly become submerged in a reality-altering haze of lavender induced hell on earth. No clever maneuver can save you now. You must face the full paralyzing force of all that is lavender.
It is during these moments, in which reality will appear to bend before you. The mental distortion resulting from the pockets of lavender is surreal, and your brain will freeze in confusion. Tears will well rapidly, choking your vision and blurring your senses.
All of this of course transpiring while amidst the company of cackling housewives and middle-aged women, who ALL are seemingly immune to the noxious haze.
If you care for your life, the only choice is retreat. The sophisticated chemical weaponry that these women posses is far beyond anything we could ever imagine. True weapons of mass destruction.
For all of you that are lucky enough to have avoided this onslaught: Just wait. You too will come face to face with this silent killer. Don't say I didn't warn you.
Slow internet is the latest torture, Gabriel. A big grin and a 'Hello!' from Romania.
Hmmm. I've always thought that fast food chains should come out with their own fragrances. I mean, what could be more romantic to a male than food? The Whopper Whiff. The BigMacDaddy. etc etc. Could also do a BBQ steak cologne. Or taco scented soap... then again, most of us would probably try to eat it...
Where do i sign up for Fresh Cut Lawn and New Powerbook?
Just a spritz of WD-40 and Im good to go.
Sign me up for the new powerbook smell..... i here their going to be adding a new scent, G5 industral strength, for those morning after oders....