Read article : Shower gel better than soap? It just won't wash
- Eight out of ten people wash themselves with gels costing up to £4 a bottle
- Tesco has 94 gel brands on sale, each with its own name, ingredients and unique smell
Cleaning up: Gels first appeared in British bathrooms in the Seventies. Today some 200million bottles are sold in Britain every year
Whoever invented shower gel must lie awake at night — no doubt in a gold-plated, four-poster bed — chuckling at the audacity of it all.
Here is a product that is expensive, packed full of man-made chemicals, difficult to use and wasteful. And yet, thanks to the persuasive power of marketing, bottles of it sit proudly in almost every bathroom in the land.
Once, we cleaned ourselves with bars of long-lasting soap that cost the equivalent of a few pence a week. Today, more than eight out of ten people wash themselves with gels costing up to £4 a bottle.
Not that shower gel manufacturers admit they are involved in the business of washing, of course. Instead, they sell their wares as revitalising foams, honey shower milks and rebalancing body experiences.
Imperial Leather’s Japanese Spa Foam Burst is, it claims, designed to help you wake up in the morning. Palmolive’s Absolute Relax is supposed to send you to sleep.
You will struggle to find a shower gel that admits what it is really intended for: as a way of removing dirt, sweat and grease. Long gone are the days of explicit adverts for Lifebuoy — the soap that said ‘No to BO’.
But if Britain has gone crazy for shower gel, with an estimated 200 million bottles sold in the UK each year, there are signs of rebellion.
Former Tory MP, television presenter and newspaper columnist Matthew Parris recently went on the offensive.
In a passionate attack against pointless toiletries, he highlighted the design flaws of shower gels.
Gels have come a long way since PZ Cussons, the makers of Imperial Leather for a long time regarded as the traditional hard soap for middle-class families
He pointed out that most of the bottles don’t stand upright on curved soap dishes, or they leak when hanging from their plastic hooks. They are difficult to open, easy to spill and hard to apply (how do you use shower gel to wash your feet?)
And most of the gel squirted into the user’s hands slides to the floor to be washed down the drain.
While the secret of soap-making goes back to at least the Ancient Babylonians in 2800 BC, when animal fat was mixed with the ashes of wood fires and melted, the first liquid soap was patented in 1865
Parris — who stopped using shampoo years ago and who claims his hair has never been cleaner — estimates that millions of gallons of gel are washed away unused every year.
Despite these flaws, Britain’s love affair with shower gel is going strong. Tesco, at last count, had 94 brands on sale, each with its own name, ingredients and unique smell.
Most sane people would struggle to come up with 94 different conventional fragrances for toiletries. But the clever people at Unilever and Cussons have got round that by persuading consumers that what they really want to smell like is food: thus we can wash ourselves with Chocolate and Mint shower gel, Milk and Honey shower creme, or Cranberry and Honey shower scrubs.
Evidently, gels have come a long way since PZ Cussons, the makers of Imperial Leather — for a long time regarded as the traditional hard soap for middle-class families — introduced its first ‘Luxury Shower Gel’ in 1978.
Former Tory MP Matthew Parris recently highlighted the design flaws of shower gels
Gels were, in part, a response to a change in bathroom habits that saw showers growing in popularity as our lives became busier and we all became more aware of the need to use water sparingly.
But the rise of shower gels can’t be explained simply by the move from the twice-weekly bath to the daily shower. After all, showers had already become a staple of homes by the Seventies, and for at least a decade after that, most people were happy with soap — or occasionally the more exotic ‘soap on a rope’.
The secret of their success lies in the fact that while they are cheap to manufacture, they are easy to brand as a luxury. By selling them as modern, convenient and indulgent, cosmetic companies cleaned up.
While the secret of soap-making goes back to at least the Ancient Babylonians in 2800 BC, when animal fat was mixed with the ashes of wood fires and melted, the first liquid soap — the forerunner of today’s shower gels — was patented in 1865.
Modern gels are more complicated to make. But their basic ingredient, a detergent that sticks to grease and water, is similar to the detergent in hard soap bars.
'Most of the differences between brands are trivial in terms of what they do functionally — removing dirt and grease. But the real difference — and this is the genius of marketing — is how those small differences, like the fragrance and the associations that come with that fragrance, can be used to create something more than the product'
In order to remain thick, perfumed and coloured, a typical shower gel must contain around 20 chemicals, some man-made, others derived from plants. It will have a couple of plant-based detergents, an array of perfumes, salt to thicken it, glycerine — a clear, sticky liquid used in cough mixtures and icing on cakes — to make the gel silky, film-forming agents, lactic acid (found in sour milk to counteract the alkali and make it pH- neutral), preservatives, agents that reduce static in human hair and natural plant extracts.
Most of these plant extracts have very little practical purpose and are just for marketing purposes so that the gels can have fancy names.
And marketing is what it is all about. From the earliest days of industrially produced soap, manufacturers realised that to sell more soap, they needed to persuade Britons to become more ‘hygienic’: the more people washed, the bigger the profits.
So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that some of the earliest and most successful advertising campaigns were for soaps.
Costly: Today, more than eight out of ten people wash themselves with gels costing up to £4 a bottle
The English company Lever Brothers created Lifebuoy in 1895 and sold it as an antiseptic soap. The company also invented the term BO for body odour. Pears devised a sophisticated transparent soap and launched the yearly search for Miss Pears.
Yet no marketing campaign for soap was enough to fend off the advance of shower gels.
Those who prefer gels say they are happy to put up with the extra expense for the sake of convenience: unlike soap, they don’t leave scum or mess around the shower, and small amounts go a long way.
But for many, they are a victory of marketing over common sense.
One of the UK’s top marketing gurus, who has worked with many gel manufacturers, said: ‘Most of the differences between brands are trivial in terms of what they do functionally — removing dirt and grease.
‘But the real difference — and this is the genius of marketing — is how those small differences, like the fragrance and the associations that come with that fragrance, can be used to create something more than the product.
‘That value to the brand is real. If a product has associations of being refreshing in the morning or relaxing in the evening, it can be a genuine bonus for the consumer; it might help people feel relaxed or refreshed.
‘Some of that association is intrinsic in the ingredients of gel, but much of it is created through advertising.’
So are we being taken for a ride by the marketing types? The answer is probably yes. But then, how many of us would really want to go back to using half a bar of soap in the shower when we could be reaching for a bottle of that oh-so fragrant Japanese Spa Foam Burst?
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