Nature's Blend – Walnut & Sandalwood

“Artie Fufkin”

I'm not finding too much internet exposure for this soap—I searched by name, looked at images, found one, looks just like the one I have, and that's because it's my photo! It's under #newsoapsunday, which is now a world-wide, albeit infrequently exploited, destination. I'm happy to help out, Internet—but when are you going to kneel down and kiss my ass? This soap is from New Zealand, which is about as far away as you can get without, you know, going into space. I'm looking at my globe, and it looks to be about the same size and shape as California. Can that be right? Maybe it's like the the anti-matter California, like if you're a worthless shit, you could go to New Zealand and find someone who looks almost exactly like you who's a good person. Technically, you could launch a one-person sailboat off from the California coast somewhere and just take a straight shot across the Pacific and land in New Zealand in a few—what? I have no idea how long it takes! Make sure you take plenty of energy bars and some fresh water. So how does this soap, made down there, get back up here anyway—and end up being affordable? I suppose by some kind of container ship, packed in with a lot of other crap.

The rather hefty bar came simply wrapped in kind of loose plastic with a wraparound paper label with all your pertinent information and virtually no graphics. Really, this is one of most minimally packaged soaps I've seen. The name is so innocuous as to suggest a parody. The ingredients do include some chemical-y crap, but also walnut grounds, sandalwood oil, glycerin, and fragrance—yet the fragrance is so subtle I'm not even going to try to describe it. The good thing, I suppose, is that it doesn't have an off-putting, lingering presence like that other nut soap, the pistachio one, did. The rectangular bar is a very uniform, pale beige color, but once you start to use it, walnut fragments reveal themselves and give you this pleasant, kind of fun texture—though I don't know if it has, really, an exfoliating function. You'll find a lot of cheerleading for the health claims of walnut, when eaten, and you know, they just feel healthy, if a little boring. Though, at one point, way back, I bought a huge bag of shelled walnuts very cheaply, and one afternoon ate way too many. I mean, I think it was too many, because later I hurled—though I can't say for sure if that was the walnuts' fault. But since then, I've been a little frosty toward them. I can't really say if they add to the fragrance in this situation, and honestly I do not smell sandalwood at all, which doesn't mean it's not there. Overall, this is a really pleasant, long-lasting, inoffensive, healthy feeling, nice bar of soap. I guess you don't always need to be jumping up and down about something, right?

Soap Review No. 67