business practices

Until the early 1980s almost every bathroom had a few bars of soap… commercially made, bought in bulk from the grocery store.  TV commercials advocated virtues to using these bars of soap, and fed us a myth that if we used that soap we would develop special qualities…. beyond clean and fresh.  It was the heyday of brands like Irish Spring, Dial, and Dove.  Bar soap dominated the market, and we all used them. Then it happened – the advent of the liquid soap movement, and the antibacterial soap movement saw the ever expanding shelf displays of bottled liquid soap, of antibacterial soap.  The media whipped a frenzy of thoughts about how much bacteria was out there, and how we need to sanitize, to bomb our skin with antibacterial soaps.  And we did.