Style

What is this a picture of you ask? Why, it’s just a bottle of hand soap. Except, it’s not. It’s a pretty bottle of hand soap, and these? These are hard to come by. Because I have looked, and my journey, it has been a long one.

This week I’m busy tying up some loose ends on a book I’m putting together for a small publisher in New York (an anthology of essays written by me and various other people that will be available next summer if we can get our butts in gear), and because this assignment has been occupying a large amount of my brain space I haven’t had time to add a few features to this website that I’ve been thinking about for almost a year. Jon and I will be sitting down in the next few weeks to make a huge overhaul to things around here, and I’ve been dying to add a section where I can collect my thoughts on design and beautiful, everyday things (like clothes, home decor, office supplies, packaging, etc.). So I’m just going to go ahead and get going on this, even though Jon is sitting across from me right now gritting his teeth at the amount of work I’m creating for him. He can just go ahead and shut up because he was fully aware when he married me that his life would be nothing but the grueling task of pushing a giant rock up a hill only to have me tell him at the top that I need him to move it over to the right a couple inches. That way a little bit. No, that way. A little more. Almost there. Perfect. Now go get me another rock.

So, hand soap. How can I possibly write more than one word about hand soap? Maybe it’s because I’ve become a fanatical hand-washer since having a child, but we go through this stuff faster than we go through a fifth of bourbon, and bourbon in this house, it is more precious than water. Most hand soaps come in vile containers, all covered in flowers or neon colors that make it look like an open wound just sitting there on the countertop. I sometimes find them so ugly that I store them underneath the sink and force everyone in the house to retrieve it from that spot every time they wash their hands. And if they don’t put it back underneath the sink when they’re done? If they leave it sitting there so that it can broadcast its ugliness in my face? I question their love for me and then passive-aggressively act like it’s no big deal until I can pull it out of my arsenal of resentment and use it to prove a point. Jon calls this “playing the martyr.” I call it “strategy.”

This particular bottle of hand soap, however, is quite different from most. First, it doesn’t leave a sticky residue on my hands or require so much work to rinse off that I’ve started peeling away layers of skin. Two, the design of the bottle goes with everything, and we have one sitting next to the sink in the kitchen and both bathrooms. The bottle looks like it was designed specifically with the style of my house in mind. Three, the entire thing is biodegradable, and there isn’t a single ingredient in the soap that is harmful to the environment. Behold, a hand soap that makes you feel like you’re saving the world.

Bonus: it is shaped so that one could easily balance it on one’s head if ever the occasion required it.

You can buy it from the manufacturer here for $5 a bottle, although the cost of shipping is a bit ridiculous. Amazon sells it in packages of six for $28.29 (which comes out to about $4.71 per bottle), but we bought it at our local Target for under four dollars per bottle (I cannot find it anywhere on Target’s website).

UPDATE: You can also get them at Office Depot for $4.69 a bottle. (thanks, Cara)

Note: I’m posting about this hand soap because I love it, not because someone asked or paid me to do so. I do not run that kind of website, so you can trust that if I’m talking about a product here that I’m doing so with nothing but benevolent intentions, that I’m getting nothing out of it but the pure joy of sharing something I love with you. Because remember, THE LORD IS WATCHING AND TAKING NOTES.

If you’ve stumbled across something you think I might like, you can send suggestions to: style at dooce dot com.