Showered With Happiness

On December 31st or January 1st I was going to do a wrap-up of the year and write a little more about my neurological oddity, clear up a few things, add stuff I had forgotten, but it turns out that writing more about it is just as hard as writing about it was in the first place, so that's going to have to wait, although I did want to thank everyone who commented, because you were all really nice. And to think I was so worried about exposing myself so completely!

As I mentioned in late October, I got some Yves Rocher shower gel and hand soap in their limited-edition holiday Orange and Chocolate scent, and it is lovely stuff, which it would appear you can still buy, although I am going to warn you that the texture of these liquid soaps (which are identical in every way except the bottle) is not that great, being far too runny--more corn oil than corn syrup. But the smell is enchanting, and it's well worth the money.

But at least you can get that. Unless you live in the British Isles, you presumably can't get any of the next things I wanted to talk about, which in retrospect seems a bit mean, but at least if you're travelling there you can look for them.

When Jim and I were in the UK this past spring, I bought little bottles of shower gel from a company called Original Source; I got some Lemon and Tea Tree (smells like lemon meringue pie) and Mint (tingly, jazzy, and wide-awakey), and knew I had to get some more before I left. When I went to look for it in London before heading home, I couldn't find the Lemon, so I bought Lime instead. Some of Original Source's products are artificially scented, as we will see, but these three aren't, and so the Lime smells strikingly fresh and realistic. Jim tried some a couple of months after we got home and was instantly addicted: he doesn't like most artificial scents, but this smelled like the real thing. We tried to get some lime oil to put into an unscented shower gel, but there were two problems: 1) we couldn't find lime oil locally (though we could have ordered it for a fair bit of money), and 2) we couldn't find truly unscented shower gel (since even "unscented" or "fragrance-free" on a package doesn't generally mean that, and if it did, you probably wouldn't buy the product).

So we doled out tiny quantities of the shower gel to make it last--I still had the Mint and Lemon ones to fall back on, in addition to, as you can well imagine, others--and then in October when we decided to go back to London for a week, we knew that we would have to stock up. And did we ever. We ended up buying the equivalent of thirteen bottles of the Lime: five of the 250-mL bottle in ones and twos (so that we wouldn't look like complete freaks), and then four more of the

500-mL refill pouches when we discovered those at the local Sainsbury's. I wanted to get more, but Jim put his foot down, figuring our luggage was already heavy enough, and he was right. (We had left for the UK with our luggage half-empty, and when we got on the train to return home from Halifax, I discovered that my checked bag weighed 50.65 pounds. In addition to all that shower gel, we had bought a lot of books.)

On top of all that Lime shower gel, I bought a full-sized bottle of the Lemon

and also a pouch of Chocolate and Mint, which of course has some artificial scent in it but which is nevertheless charming, and also one last irresistible thing,

Winter, which supposedly consists of black pepper and cardamom but which also has other fragrance notes in it ("parfum" on the label), and I should say so, because it smells gorgeously like a very strong, spicy late-seventies or early-eighties men's cologne. (The word "WINTER" on the label appears to be set in lights like a marquee, but those are actually snowflakes, in case you were wondering.) I was going to use it on December 21st, but I kept forgetting until last night just before going to bed when I took it out of the storage closet so that I could shower with it this morning. The texture of all the Original Source gels is perfect--smooth and thick, just liquid enough so that it disperses instantly in water in your hand or on your skin.

As I seem to feel the need to state every now and then, the Original Source people--who as it turns out are not affiliated with Boots, as I mistakenly surmised back in May--are not paying me to say any of this, although frankly if they want to send me a bunch of product I'll happily receive it, because there are still a lot of their shower gels I haven't tried yet and won't be able to until I get back to the UK, which could take a couple of years, and while I'm at it I have to say that they really, really need to figure out a way to sell their stuff in North America, because it would go over gangbusters here. If you live in the UK, lucky you!