Dove – White

"Computer Mouse"

Dove is probably one of the most ubiquitous soaps in the USA, for some reason—I guess you have to ask yourself if you think it's because it's popular, and if so, why—is it because it's the cheapest, the boring-est, or the best, or does availability have some play in that, as in, it's in every store out there, and a lot of soap can't get in the store, and why? So What I'm talking about is, essentially organized crime. That is, what can get in what store and why? Is it based on corporate big money influence? I don't even have to answer that. Anyway, Dove has been around since the Fifties, so it's been soap I've known about my whole life. I have no memory whatsoever of what kind of soap my parents bought regularly, when I was a kid. But I wouldn't be surprised if they tried a lot of different ones over the years, not unlike what I'm doing now.

So even though this stuff is as common as dirt, I want to examine some of the really ordinary soaps as well as the more obscure ones. The shape of the Dove bar is like an odd, sculptured oval—the best way to describe it is to say it's shaped like a bar of Dove soap. I feel like some computer mouses have been designed with the Dove soap bar in mind, it's so close. And then there is certain automobile design that also looks like a bar of Dove soap, most significantly an early Toyota Camry—though I'm not if I didn't think that because the name Camry reminded me of Camay soap—I think it was the combination of the name and the shape, but I called that “the soap bar car.”

The smell of Dove is so common and recognizable that you could put it in the dictionary of smells under “soap” as an example of what soap smells like. (I realize there may actually be a dictionary of smells that I don't know about yet, but if not, I am looking forward to the actual dictionary of smells, someday!) The bar is pure white, and the smell smells white and clean, like soap, like Dove, like you'd imagine a dove (the bird) to smell, if you didn't know better—that it probably smells a lot like a duck. I'm giving it one more good smell here, but I just can't nail it down (is it floral?—maybe, I don't know). I guess it smells like Dove soap. It's pleasant to me, and I might be buying some in the future, for nostalgia's sake, but if it was the only soap smell in the world, that would be sad indeed.

Soap Review No. 13