To this day, shower bottles divert my attention from the actions at hand. So many times I have found myself absently lathering my shoulder for the 15th time, circling and circling as I read the back of the shampoo bottle. For the longest time the three languages extended my foreign language experience. I studied the nuances of English colloquialisms and how they translated into French and Spanish and how they often didn't translate at all.
I imagined these same bottles being read by fair-skinned, dark-haired Spanish women in Barcelona while bathing in their tiled showers. Were they thinking the same thing? Did they wonder why the description of Abba Shampoo was for "chemically treated hair" but in Spanish and French the translation is "colored, fragile or stripped." I wondered if there wasn't a word for chemically treated hair and why not. (Slowly the lather would accumulate on my shoulder or my belly as the questions bubbled up in my mind).
Why are there instructions in French? Why are they being shipped to France? It took me a while to figure out that our friends in the frozen North spoke French and English. Now I got it. Marketing. Okay so the Spanish was for the women and men in tiled showers in Mexico instead of Spain, I bet. It started to make more sense, that was until I looked at the back of my bottle of Kerastase Ciment Thermique (Heat Activated Reconstructor Milk) by L'Oreal, Paris. The instructions are translated into 12 different languages. My imagination went wild developing the routes that Fed-Ex took to deliver this reconstructor milk (sans rincage) to Italy and Finland, Great Britain and Espana, the U.S of A and Russia and other countries that I can't decipher the language.
When I was taking more advanced chemistry classes in college a new language opened up to me and the ingredients or ingredientes started to sound very interesting indeed. In my minds eye the pentagonal structure of methylchloroisothiazolinone appeared. I knew what isopropyl looked like from my organic chem class as well as what a paraben or methyl group was. Flying around in my brain were 2 dimensional chemical structures.
Recently I started to share a bathroom with my husband and son and they have all sorts of men-only care products. One of them is Irish Spring. When I was a kid there was a commercial on tv with a handsome Irishman who would cut the bar of soap and one would see the green and white clean Irishness through the whole soup. You knew that because he was doing this next to a refreshing waterfall, you too would be that clean and marry a Irishman that carried a pocketknife and a bar of soap.
Body washes are not as fun as bar soaps. Soaps are fun and slippery and you can twirl them in your hand, sculpting them into hourglass shapes or scratch your name into them. The particular body wash in my husband's and son's shower is in a bottle shaped a lot like a rocket ship and claims to have an "invigorating scent," but the bottle claims to be for men. I worry. If I use it, will I smell like a man? Does smelling like an Irish Spring scream, "welcome to the 80's?" I use it anyway some days. Did you know?
No comments:
Post a Comment