Contributing writer
For 20 years now, my cousin, Keith, has used the same brand of shampoo. In that time the only innovation he recalls was that they added conditioner to the shampoo, which made it a two-for-one product. He liked the smell. It worked. He loved it.
Last week, standing in the shower, he grabbed his newest bottle of shampoo and lathered up his hair.
“What is this?” he hollered with soap in his eyes and his hair on fire.
He pried open one eye and peered at the familiar green bottle, “FRESH” was the only word he could read without his glasses. Something had happened to his shampoo.
“It’s like my scalp was kinda on fire; almost alive,” Keith said. “My eyes were watering.”
This was a punishing experience.
Once he gained his equilibrium and had dried off, he put on my glasses and in fine print underneath “FRESH” he read “Menthol added for an invigorating sensation.”
“Invigorating, my foot. Why can’t they leave well enough alone,” Keith muttered, jamming the shampoo back into the sack with the receipt.
Being a man of action, he promptly took the shampoo back to the store.
At the return counter the woman asked, “Was anything wrong with this product?”
“This is awful,” Keith reported, and he went on to explain the sensation of fire on his head and burning in his eyes.
“And you don’t like that feel?” asked the woman at the counter, with a chuckle.
“No, I do not,” came back the answer with vehemence. “With all that menthol, when I got out of the shower, I felt like I’d smoked a KOOL cigarette.”
Back on the shampoo aisle, Keith discovered that they do still make his old style shampoo but he has to be more careful to read the fine print, more discriminating since the choices have quadrupled.
Have you noticed that the explosion of varieties with old tried-and-true product names attached is mind-boggling? I went into the store the other day to buy mouthwash. A half an hour later, my sister came hunting for me.
“What’s taking you so long?” she wanted to know.
I was reading the fine print on mouthwash for whiter teeth, another bottle for healthier gums, a third bottle was a combination of the two, and a fourth bottle was just for use at night. Where one bottle with its familiar green color used to stand, there were now a half dozen variations of content (supposedly) and as many size distortions with a wide variety of price points.
“Why don’t they leave well enough alone?” I muttered to my sister as I headed to the register.
They are doing it with everything. Tomato sauce, a simple, comforting familiar product, now comes in no salt, low sodium, hot peppers added, pureed, chopped, chunked, and organic. Woe to the person who doesn’t wear their glasses or got used to the spot on the shelf so that you just pick up a couple of cans without thinking.
Triple T used to be a fanatic about his shampoo — he swore by one brand, would use no other. I met my Waterloo the day he called and said, “Pick me up some shampoo.”
I knew the brand but once more encountered that product overload. We had shampoo for color treated hair, curly hair, straight, dry, oily, damaged, and normal hair, volumizing, taming, straightening, and tinting drab hair shampoo.
I wasted another day in the country trying to find regular, normal, plain shampoo. Why can’t they leave well enough alone?