I am a sucker for packaging. Sometimes I go to the supermarket and I’ll say to myself, “Oh my, doesn’t that product look nice! If the company that made it cared so much about it to give it such a nice wrapper, it must be very high quality!”
This usually screws me and case in point is Pangea liquid hand soap. Comes in a nice brown bottle with a very nice typeface on it. The soap smells good, but it actually doesn’t really do much apart from coat your hands in gooey perfume. Worse, the soap solidifies on the pump if it’s unused for 6 hours or so, so after that time you need to hit it hard to get any soap out. Usually you get 5x as much soap as you need after you break the dry soap seal. Worse than that, that nice brown container, if it’s near a window and you used the soap the night before, overnight the dry soap seal will get strong, and in the afternoon when the sun is high and the sunlight hits it and warms the bottle the soap will explode out and make the sink sticky. That’s usually 10 or 20 uses of soap right there, every sunny day. So if you use hand soap twice a day, in the morning that’s 5 soaps, then in the afternoon it explodes, that’s 20 or so soaps, and then in the evening if it’s late to break the seal that’s another 5 soaps. So basically that soap doesn’t last so long, which is good because it doesn’t work.
And the packaging that it comes in that supposedly had sweet basil seeds embedded in it, breathlessly waiting to sprout from the landfills and carpet the earth in fragrant herbs? It’s day 10 since we’ve been incubating them under the gro-lite and there’s nothing sprouting but some greenish algae.
