Soap and Chemicals

I used Dove soap very happily for years and years and years. Love the Dove "Campaign for Real Beauty" that promotes self esteem for girls and women. I WANT to like the product, but I don't. See, I have eczema, which typically only bothers me in the dry winter months. This past winter we traveled and spent time in a hotel where they had some fancy spa soaps. I tried the oatmeal soap and it seemed to help the itchies. After returning home I started to experiment with the oatmeal and natural soaps they sell at Whole Foods. I didn't get the same results, and after about six months of trying various natural soaps my eczema was worse, since I'm now itchy in the summer, too.

So I went back to Dove. Only now I can't stand the smell. I never noticed it when I was using Dove all the time, but it smells like plastic! The smell doesn't linger or anything, but I don't like it when I'm washing. (I use the unscented hypoallergenic stuff.)

I don't like anything, soap, food, cleaning products, etc., that smells or tastes of chemicals and/or plastic. When I drink bottled water (with apologies to the environment) I avoid Evian because it tastes of plastic. Or it did the last time I tried it, which was a bazillion years ago. I never could understand why Evian was so popular for so long. It's also the reason I don't like Agave. That aftertaste... might as well be an artificial sweetener. Blech. Same thing for TV dinners, although I've found a brand that tastes like FOOD, of all things. That would be Amy's. They put out some pretty good frozen food! The whole family loves their Margherita pizza. Some of their other frozen food items are also good, although I have to avoid the ones with soy. The kids like them though, so they're good things to stock for a quick meal the kids can make themselves.

I guess we're spoiled since we usually cook from scratch. We have the Amy's pizza about once a week, along with a home made salad, and that's about it. The kids may eat the frozen dinners but I don't. It's amazing how your taste buds can reject the garbage if you're used to eating the good stuff. The same thing goes for fat levels in food. We are so used to cooking and eating low fat/healthy fat foods that now a serving of restaurant french fries will make us ill. Not just me, the kids too. Well, maybe not The Wild Child since he's such a junk food junkie. It always amazes me how we can have such healthy food in our house, yet he still manages to eat an unhealthy diet overall. For instance, we still eat regular white pasta. I know, I know, we should switch to whole grain, but I've tried several brands and no one eats it. So we stick with the white, but we'll put all sorts of healthy stuff with it. The Wild Child will ignore the healthy stuff and eat just the pasta with barbecue sauce on it for a meal. We're having our pasta as a base for a veggie and egg stir fry. He's eating... pasta and barbecue sauce. What the heck can you do? I throw up my hands in despair, is what I do. The child's got to eat.

But I digress. The main point was to write about soap; guess I'm going all Faulkner again.