Have you ever noticed how ridiculous the names of some products are? I was in the soap aisle the other day and was amazed at the odd names of some of the soaps. I don’t know why I never noticed it before, but I’m beginning to think you can call your product anything you want as long as it has semi-attractive packaging and proper marketing.
Some of the names aren’t too bad – Ivory, for example, brings to mind an image of purity and spotlessness. Even Irish Spring is understandable – a spring seems like a nice, refreshing place to get clean…although I’m not sure why a spring located in Ireland is any more refreshing than a spring located anywhere else. Still, I appreciate the fact that if I ever venture across the pond to the land of leprechauns, I can anticipate what it will smell like and prepare accordingly.
On the other hand, some of the other soap names are just odd. For example:
Caress
This just seems completely inappropriate and a bit creepy. When you stop and think about it, it’s a bit surprising that this soap has never had charges filed against it for sexual harassment or something similar.
Dove
Is this a soap made specifically for ornithologists? Maybe it has a specially formulated scent that will not drive away birds, so that they can be more easily observed and studied. I assume it’s kind of like hunters pouring deer pee on themselves, but with prettier packaging and marketed almost exclusively to women.
Lava
I realize that this soap is meant for tougher jobs, but lava? Really? Has anyone ever had hands so dirty that the best solution is to lather them up with the molten liquid from a volcanic explosion? I think I’d rather just have slightly dirty hands that have been Caressed.
Lever 2000
Umm…what? How did a person even come up with this name for a bar of soap? Were they attempting to use this particular bar of soap as a lever to catapult themselves into the 21st century? I’m not sure what else the 2000 could possibly mean outside of trying to sound futuristic, but if that’s the case, this bar of soap needs a updated name. Lever 2100? Or maybe Lever 3000 to sound even more futuristic?
The longer I looked, the stranger the names seemed. What other oddly named bodily cleansers have you seen?
TIM PAYNE 