Middle and high income nations have invented many different kinds of soap. There's soap for in the shower, in the bath, your face, feet, hair, and hands. There's soap for cleaning the bathroom, the kitchen, the floors, and carpets. Many other specialty soaps have been developed including soaps for electronics, cars, leather couches, wood, and metal. When you run out of one kind of soap you get more. It's like using the right tool for the job, you don't substitute another soap. If you do, who knows what could happen? You could mess up your suede jacket, end up with dirty dishes, or nothing could change at all. How could we get along without our soaps?
When I ran out of body wash a few days ago I asked my dad if he had any in his closet. He asked me what happened to the soap he gave me the other day. I told him that that soap was hand soap. He said that's the kind of soap he used in the shower. What?!?! You can't use hand soap in the shower... It just doesn't work. That night I scraped out what was left of my body wash (Dove) out of it's container and thought some more about soaps. Are big corporate companies just telling us we need to use a certain kind of soap for our whole bodies just so they can make money? The next night I tried using the hand soap in the shower. It didn't lather up real well and it had a somewhat medicinal smell. But I did get clean.
Now I know what soap to use when I'm strapped for cash. But I live with my dad and he grew up in a poor household so any soap will do for him. When my mom came to visit I told her that I ran out of shower gel, so she got me five bottles of the stuff from Bed, Bath, & Beyond. I don't think I'm that picky, but soap is not the same.
