Tuesday 20 July 2010

Magic Soap


The popular convention amongst bloggers seems to be: find a niche subject and then stick to it like Araldite. That is to say, prepare a recipe from some old cookbook every day of one’s life or spend a year chronicling one’s addiction to collecting Hello Kitty figurines.
You may have noticed that I’m not very good at that. My tendency is to wander away from the matter in hand quite quickly. I will start out talking about wigs and make-up and pretty soon find myself discussing funerals, drugs or depression. It's a morbid habit, I know. But I feel that I may achieve a temporary consistency with my beauty product reviews. Why? I just love beauty products.

Anyway, this will make it two in a row, so I’m on a roll.

Mum sent me a bottle of this soap when I was having chemotherapy. First of all, I love the label. Its claims put me in mind of the kind of thing that might have tripped from the lips of some snake-oil salesman out of Huckleberry Finn. Here are just a few extracts: Absolute cleanliness is Godliness! Teach the Moral ABC that unites all mankind free.’... ‘100% VEGAN. HEALTH IS OUR GREATEST WEALTH.’... ‘Shakespeare’s Hamlet, 1606: “Act well your part, complete the great full-truth task, there all the honour lies".'... ‘Enjoy only 2 cosmetics, enough sleep & Dr Bronner’s ‘Magic Soap’ to clean body-mind-soul-spirit instantly uniting One!’... ‘All-One! All-One! Exceptions eternally? Absolutely none!’

The soap itself feels silky on the body. It is liquid, rather than gel. A little goes a long way, an 8oz / 236ml bottle has lasted me several months. It does not froth up like many shower gels that contain foaming agents but it rinses off easily and leaves my skin feeling fresh and alive. The peppermint oil gives a lovely tingle.

Even after studying the label at length I still have not figured out what all the 18 possible uses might be but those that I did read include: washing the body; a face pack; cleaning teeth; washing hair; a body rub; shaving; baby bath; washing silks and woollens and washing the car.

So far I’ve used Dr Bronner’s Magic Soap primarily for washing my body and shaving my armpits. For both of those applications I highly recommend it.

Ingredients (from the Dr Bronner’s website): Water, Organic Coconut Oil*, Potassium Hydroxide**, Organic Olive Oil*, Mentha Arvensis*, Organic Hemp Oil, Organic Jojoba Oil, Organic Peppermint Oil*, Citric Acid, Tocopherol
* CERTIFIED FAIR TRADE INGREDIENTS ** None remains after saponifying oils into soap and glycerin

1 comments:

bmorgen said...

I've loved Dr. Bronner's Peppermint Pure-Castile Soap since the 70s when I was a cook at the Wild Mountain Cafe, a proto-organic hippy-run restaurant near San Francisco. We also served his seaweed flavoured corn chips with guacamole. The corn chips were so totally addictive that I would sit and eat the whole bag and then feel ill. I now realize that they tasted so good because seaweed is naturally high in MSG, the secret sauce of all fast food delights.