Moti – Luxury Bath Soap

“1971”

This is an incredibly cute, little, pink soap from India—“Moti” is its name—it could have several meanings, though one has to do with pearls, and there are what looks like pearls on the box, so we'll go with that. Of course, they might be fish eggs. Apparently it's from the company “Gulab”—though the box tells me it's made by the behemoth corporation, Unilever, the largest soap manufacturer in the world. Gulab jamun is a delicious Indian sweet, known by some Americans as “soggy donut.” The soap itself is a small pink disk with rounded edges and a six-petaled flower shape (perhaps called a “rosette”) cut into the middle, with the name “MOTI” engraved in the middle of that. I don't know, perhaps it's an acronym—try: M.O.re T.han meets the I. (eye). That's a stretch. It's a great soap to display in your guest bathroom (ha), visually, without spending a arm and an leg. My nickname for this soap is “1971” because its rather heady fragrance transported me back as if by magic time travel nostalgia carpet to when I was 11 years old, either in grade school or at a relative's house or both. It's a floral fragrance, but an exceedingly artificial one. It's hard to say why I associate it with a certain time period, but I do. All I have to do is take a big inhalation of it and I'm right there, in a grade school restroom, or at church, or in an office with elderly women presiding, or at my piano lesson. Maybe it's the piano lesson, after all—on Mrs. Patterson's ancient, conservatory, living room piano bench.

Soap Review No. 139