Dr. Bronner’s. It’s MAGIC soap.  Says so right on the label.  Magic.

I’ve never known how the truth in advertising laws deal with things that claim to be magic.  Those hucksters on the TV commercials that try to sell you the hot new versions of simple household things- “It’s a revolutionary TOWEL”… “Are you tired of having to use a pan to cook an egg?  We have this plastic whatchamacallem for YOU!”…”This car wax automatically makes your rustheap look like a lambourghini!  You don’t even have to USE it- just BUY it!”- often seem to claim that their products are Magic.  Maybe ‘magic’ is part of the name and that makes it okay.  I don’t guess there’s a government agency tasked with going around verifying that magic-claiming companies use Voodoo or Pixie Dust or +4 Staves of Manufacturing during the creation of their products.

Another thing on the label of Dr. Bronner’s is philosophy. The “ALL-ONE” philosophy.  I tell ya, it’s worth buying the extra-jumbo sized bottle of soap just to have the reading material.  Granted, it looks a little iffy to go into the camp toilet lugging a giant bottle of soap, but Dr. Bronner’s is more like a stack of religious tracts than anything.  Great stuff.  Very entertaining.

The downside to having a giant bottle of Dr. Bronner’s is that it’s going to take a while to use it all.  It’s concentrated anyhow, so it doesn’t take much for any individual application.  I don’t camp as much as I used to, so I’ve had a little 4 oz bottle now for quite a while.  And, of course, the longer you own a Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps bottle, the more likely it’s gonna leak onto something.  A little dab of concentrated soap can be tricky to eliminate.  You know how concentrated soap sort of expands and multiplies, as you add more water to clean it up.  Messy.

I have a buddy who’s Dr. Bronner’s peppermint soap leaked out onto his camptowel.  It only got on one end, so he figured he had the whole rest of the towel to use.  Soap, though, is good at osmotic motion or whatever that physics thing is called, and so the peppermint soap that spilled on a corner of the towel had insinuated itself along the strands of the fabric, apparently.  I found out when my pal’s voice whooped from the other end of the shower house. I thought he’d probably found some giant bug sharing the shower stall.  That’s common enough, but no…

Dr. Bronner’s, it says on the label, should be kept out of your eyes.  It should, apparently, be kept off other sensitive parts of one’s anatomy.  Pow!  Peppermint on the private parts.  Concentrated.  And you know how concentrated soap sort of expands and multiplies, as you add more water to clean it up.

Back in the shower he went, making “wooooooo woo woo wooooooooo” noises.