Is old trend of using soap in place of lotion back?

When I was about eight years old, I visited an aunt and ended up spending the night. The next day was a Sunday and, after I had taken a bath and dressed, my aunt pulled me towards her, took the piece of soap we had all taken a bath with, dipped it into a container of water, vigorously rubbed it between her hands, and then briskly ran the lather all over my face, arms and legs.

The lather dried fast, leaving my skin feeling leathery and taut, as if I had had the type of cosmetic surgery that stretches the skin to get rid of wrinkles or loose skin. I also looked shiny, especially on the forehead and nose, and when I moved my face a bit, I realised that my eyebrows were tightly plastered on my forehead, as if they had been painted on. It was worse when I tried to smile – it felt as if my face was cracking.

All this was new to me, but it seemed that my aunt and my cousins had been doing this kind of grooming for a while, going by how quickly that bar of soap passed from one pair of hands to another.

Finally, everyone was done sprucing up and we all trooped out of the door smelling like life-sized walking Rexona bars.

UNTIDY ZEBRA

The smell was even more over-powering when we got to church. We naturally sat together, so you can imagine what the air was like in there. There was also the fact that that morning, several other families must have gone through the same moisturising process, only that they did not all use Rexona, rather, their soap of choice – talk about a clash of smells! It was dizzying.

I should also add that it was a hot day and, given that the church had been constructed using iron sheets, within a few minutes, most of us, including yours truly, were sweating like pigs. Sweat is basically water, and you know the kind of relationship that soap and water have.

I will not exaggerate and say that bubbles began to rise from people’s armpits to the non-existent ceiling, but I will not be lying when I say that the joints between my thighs and legs began to get slippery, and when I involuntarily touched the back of my legs, my hands came up with white lather – did I tell you that my face felt as if it were melting.

My three cousins and I had won Sandaks that day (remember those plastic shoes that were all the rage in the eighties?) and, as we walked back home after the church service, our feet were sloshing in our shoes.

I would later learn that it was not only my aunt and her fellow church-mates that used soap to moisturise, apparently, this was common practice those days. It was cheaper than petroleum jelly and the strong-smelling lotions that were popular then, and what’s more, one got to smell “nice” the whole day without even using perfume.

There was a downside though – if any part of your body happened to come into contact with water, you would end up looking like an untidy zebra. This happened a lot, especially during parties or get-togethers, where there would be lots of washing up after all the eating.

This incident came to mind when I got into the lift the other day only to be hit by a powerful soap-like smell that was certainly not lotion or perfume. There were three people in the lift – two youngish men in suits and a teenage girl in ripped jeans and a tiny T-shirt. For the life of me, I could not tell who had applied soap that morning because the three could not have been alive in the eighties.

Could this soap trend be coming back? I hope not!