Anyone nurturing the idea that a man loves to shave would be grossly mistaken. This is one hardship he has to routinely undergo every morning. I do agree that as teen aged boy, he might be counting days to step in to the new world of grownups, but when the realization finally dawns it is too late! Today while I was in the act, old memories suddenly rushed in. I remembered as a child watching my father shave in the morning. During the early days he used to have the saving soap in the form of a bar packed inside a round container which subsequently gave way to present day saving cream. All Through my adulthood I never noticed a shaving bar in the regular super market shelves.
Growing up in the north eastern corner of India I can boast of experiencing things which had then become obsolete in other parts of the world. Though a state capital it could not be in termed as a city in the golden seventies. I graduated into the ranks of shave-able person and got started with a safety razor and a tube of saving cream. As I grew old and independent I gradually kept switching between Shaving cream, gel and foam of different brands. Due to advancement in the consumer products industry and invention of NICE marketing terminologies like customer satisfaction and strange abbreviated words the bar soap never got a lease of life. I reflected to my childhood days and did a mental comparison. What I could easily conclude was that as the product continued to progress from a shaving soap to cream and further forward, so did the wastage of material.
Now a days I believe that the bar soap like many other extinct product is staging a comeback via the sustainability, earth or green route. But whichever term one decides to use it is now a luxury product.
This perhaps does some justice to the saying that “progress comes at a cost”.
