Washing isn't always top of the list and it was the same with me in the Sixties. I regularly had a tide mark on my neck.
Besides corporation pop [water!], the main ingredient of the enforced daily wash was soap and once a week, shampoo, usually green toxic waste stamped Vosene, which was presumably SPECTRE speak for Bath-time Hell!
Soap was invariably bars of perfumed hardness. Brands which are surfacing from the scum of time include a strange material called coal tar soap and the market leader Cusson's Imperial Leather, which would later become the wash of choice for all cousins within the Star Wars Imperial Guard! ha ha
Coal tar soap was an oddity because the first two parts of the name suggested fossil fuels. You expected a black bar of dripping charcoal but instead you got a pearl white block. However, its cretaceous past was given away by the hidden scent, a mixture of crude oil and dinosaur-infested fern forests. Coal tar soap reeked. This wasn't washing, it was fracking!
Cusson's Imperial Leather was the coca-cola of soaps back then. It was everywhere and had that unique and essential feature, it smelt like soap and created an rather imperial lather. In fact I could never understand why it was called Leather and not Lather. Surely this was a branding typo, which just stuck. After all, leather is not the first thing that springs to mind when you need a wash, unless of course you are a mucky car in need of a shammi!
The other unique feature of Imperial Leather was a secret until the bar was used a few times. This foamy Easter egg hidden in the bar's mechanics had the glitzy sheen of an Imperial Shuttle and enough wow-factor to momentarily stop a docker soaping his armpits.
Yes, I'm talking about the small rectangular foil brand label on top of the block, which as if by magic, would remain intact whilst the soap slowly dissolved around it. A product of genius, the label became a stand. Yep, the bar of soap could balance on this pedestal on the side of the sink or the bath, keeping it away from muck and hairs and allowing the valuable cake to dry until the next dowsing.
Is there anything else as clever as the Imperial Leather label in the bubbled world of soap readers?
I can't imagine a corporation that would include such a useful feature with their product.Over here,I think the soap we buy is secretly designed to erase the bodies of the working class!
ReplyDeleteha ha, a working class eraser. Sounds like a film!
DeleteNever too late to learn something new, it seems. Imperial Leather has always been my favourite lather, along with Savon de Marseille, but it has never occurred to me that you could put that steadfast label into use and make a stand out of it!
ReplyDeleteOne class of soaps has always intrigued me as we never had them here, namely the moulded kiddie soaps. Was there a plentiful of them, were they a luxury or everyday items. Some of the old ones are really cool collectibles, Mr. Turnip television soap being my favourite.
Yep, its the secret stand Arto, a hidden knowledge that is passed on to the chosen few, the Imperial Guard! ha ha. Yep, moulded novelty soap has always been a fave of mine. I got some as a kid and my brothers got Soap on a Rope in the shape of cars. As an adult collector I always bought TV related soap when I found mint examples at Car boots. The Thunderbirds SPV and TB4 were good ones to find boxed and much older were soap replica of Hummel figurines.
DeletePs. Browsing around, found this gem of a figural soap by a company set up in Preston UK
ReplyDeletehttps://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/english-boxed-figural-spaceman-soap-1735755769
That's brill that Arto, a Preston Spaceman. And I thought there was obly me! ha ha. It looks like an Archer doesn't it. I wonder of my Dad stocked it at his Cash n carry warehouse in the Sixties and early seventies. I wish I had his old sales lists.
Delete