Serious Issues In Life

A question for the readers: is it weird if I use a bar soap that's marketed to women, like Caress or Olay or something? I have to say, my bet is that the actual chemical composition of the soap is extremely similar, they just dye it pink, cut it into a rounded oval (as opposed to a manly white rectangle) and change up the scent a bit. Clearly, women are supposed to be the ones buying those brands, much like I'm supposed to be buying Irish Spring or Zest. (Do they still make Zest? I kind of miss those super corny commercials - "Zest-Fully Clean!") But to me, soap is just soap, and unless something actively smelled bad, I would prefer to just use whatever is on sale. Yet, I find myself conflicted. What if the cashier laughs at me? What if people notice that I smell like a girl? So, when faced with the purchasing decision, I inevitably get something like Lever 2000, which feels very generic and acceptable to all.

I didn't have this problem growing up. My dad used to make all the purchasing decisions for these kinds of items, and he was motivated by one factor and one factor alone - price. Despite having one kid, no mortgage and no car loans (and both he and my mom worked) he loved scouring the Sunday paper for coupons, and then would only shop at a supermarket that then doubled the value of those coupons. So if there was a 75 cent coupon on Caress, he would cut it out, put it in his stack, go to the store, and buy it provided it was on sale or a reasonably low price. Sometimes the price was so low that after doubling the coupon to $1.50, we actually got the item for negative money. That's right - the supermarket would actually pay my dad 15 cents to take a bar of soap. If the price was high that week, he'd put the coupons in a drawer, presumably to be used later. (That never happened, and massive piles of coupons would accumulate until they all expired and we had to have a big cleaning session - in retrospect I think my dad liked the activity of hunting for and cutting coupons even more than he liked saving money.) One of the side effects of this methodology was that we always had disproportionate amounts of certain items, since we didn't buy paper towels or plastic wrap when we ran out - we bought something whenever there was a coupon and corresponding sale. There was one time when I searched through all the various cabinets in the house, and learned that we had 17 boxes of plastic wrap, one of which appeared to be from the 1980s. I made a big fuss at the time and no more plastic wrap was purchased for several years.

Anyways, I digress a bit, but the point is that our household had all kinds of soap, some of it "for women" and some "for men". I never paid much attention to it, and generally liked all the soaps the same. But now that I don't have the safety net of my dad's purchasing decision, I see how easily swayed I am by marketing to buy a bar of soap that maybe costs 20 cents more even though I don't like it any better. Am I just being completely irrational? I guess that's why they make "Nivea: For Men" and stuff like that. I bet I would buy those products too, except I don't shave often enough to need a lot of stuff for my face.