La Florentina – Pomegranate

“Guest House”

Writing these soap reviews isn’t always a picnic, and I’d probably stop doing it if the pay wasn’t so good, but I need the money to support my habit of abusing dangerous, recreational drugs. For one thing, these little two- or three-word sub-titles, in quotes (this one being “Guest House”) are somewhat tedious to come up with. If you think about it, trying to sum something up in one to three words is very difficult—it’s almost like naming your band or kid, or coming up with a tagline for a product, or naming your new beer. People get paid a lot of money for that crap. And then things like this: This soap came in a rather large box (there were three bars, and I gave away two of them, nice gifts) but it was too big to put with my other soap boxes and wrappers (in the bathroom medicine cabinet) so now I’m looking all over for the dumb box so I can write about it. Apparently, I stored something in the box, but what? Maybe filled it with rare coins, or I’m storing my old masks in it. I don’t know. That’s the trouble with living in a palatial mansion, it gets hard to find stuff, sometimes—all these rooms, up the stairs, down the stairs—you’d think I’d get enough exercise just looking for stuff, going up and down the stairs. But no.

Oh, well, I’ll go by memory. It’s a pomegranate soap from Italy—they say “handmade” but I rarely believe that—apparently, if your employees do indeed have hands at the end of their arms, you can call something “handmade.” I also remember seeing some ingredients on the box that I would have needed to spend half the day looking up on the internet… but not finding the box has spared me of that. The soap is swell. It has a lovely, soft feel, very lush, and a pungent, intriguing fragrance which is quite nice. I’d guess it’s pomegranate, but I haven’t smelled a pomegranate in a while, so I don’t remember exactly. It used to be you’d have someone over and they’d always bring a pomegranate, which was always a lot of fun. I just ate kernels of corn for lunch, so it just occurred to me how much the little pomegranate things (are they called kernels?) resemble kernels of corn. I guess they’re all seeds. I mean, when you think about it, everything on Earth can be divided up as either seeds or pods. Anyway, the soap it off-white, not red, but it smells fruity and exotic. It’s Italian. And handmade. I love having it in my bathroom as a hand soap—it makes me feel like a rich guy living the good life. I love the shape of it—that kind of egg-shaped oval, very pleasing in the hands. And before you start the soap, and wear it down, you have to admire the intricate design details, the name carved in, and the company logo in bas-relief—it must take some real skill to render all this on the soap. You kind of don’t want to use it, even—it should be in the art museum. There needs to be more soap in the art museum.

Soap Review No. 154