After Shave After Time

It is quite possible that I have mentioned this before. Many things get mentioned in these pages over time. Perhaps a little reprise before heading off into newer pastures.

An awful lot of years ago, when I was just a small person (known in polite circles as a child), we used to take a bath every week whether we needed it or not. It was the custom, a tradition of the times.

Nowadays, of course, we have shower units in the house and so a daily—or even a twice daily, shower bath is the order of the day.

When it came to the daily wash or the weekly soak in the tub we would lave ourselves industrially with perfumed soap.

Perfumed. Yes. We had ‘Wright’s Coal Tar’ soap and ‘Pears’ soap—that was the one you could almost see through. Smelt good.

After using either of these you would emerge from the toilette fresh as a daisy and smelling good. Well, clean, perhaps, if not actually ‘good’!

The alternatives were limited. We had ‘Ocean Spray’ scent, or some sort of conifer based perfumed soap like ‘Pine Forest’ that smelt vaguely like the resin from a fir tree. Some expensive soaps were scented with camphor wood or a similarly exotic product.

Our ‘cheap’ ones were ‘Rose’ or ‘Devon Violets’; slightly up-market would be ‘Lavender’ or ‘Musk’.

Gentleman’s scents were not readily identifiable as anything specific but we would all wash in flowers or pine trees of some sort.

Today I had a shower. Not remarkable, really, except that I cleansed myself with ‘Honey and Goat’s Milk’. I could have had one of sundry fruits like ‘Apple’, ‘Strawberry’, ‘Melon’ in which case I should have been delayed in my ablutions because my brain would almost certainly have been mired in a decision making process—wash with it or eat it?

When did we move from cleaning ourselves with flowers, trees and ocean scents to using food?

At what point did the soap makers decide that we needed to lather ourselves in cider?

At what point does it stop? Are we heading for ‘Fruit Cocktail’ shampoos or, perhaps, a medley of ‘Raspberry, Strawberry and Peach Yoghurt’ shower gel?

Yes, ‘Peach’. Mine ran out the other day I am deliriously excited to inform you.

My point is, what is next? Where do we go in the future for yet greater excitement in the bathroom?

I hesitate to mention ‘Dogs**t Aftershave’ lest some manufacturer reads this and cries, “Eureka! The wave of the future!” taking me at my word in the process.

But, seriously, where next?

The thought that occurs to me is that with the gradual depletion of our stocks of hydrocarbons, diesel fuel may become the new ‘Chanel No.5’.

We could lather ourselves with the “Refreshing Aroma of ‘Lead Free Gasoline’!” Our shampoo might be redolent with that good old-fashioned scent of ‘Brent Crude—a light way to start your day.’

Tar. We did have ‘Wright’s Coal Tar’ soap. That could make a comeback. Perhaps there might be a delicate miasma of naphtha wafting around our bathrooms when oil out-prices gold on the Stock Exchanges floors.

My son thinks that shampooing in ‘Fruits of the Forest Aroma Therapy’ is normal, what will he think in the future? As I do? That not all changes are for the best?

We sci-fi writers tend not to think too much about the personal habits of our characters but what if we did? Perhaps we should think more about personal hygiene in the future and the scents that surround our heroes and villains.

I wonder what the ‘Hulk’ smells like?