Uncommon Madness and the Altoids Of Soap

Have I talked about Dr. Bronner’s here before? My searches say not, but I remember expounding upon it recently–although it might have been at my poker game.

If you don’t know Dr. Bronner’s, I’m not even sure where to start trying to explain it.

The short version is this: my shower contains a bottle of liquid peppermint soapIt’s easy to get in Halifax–even Pete has it.. It’s ridiculously strong–I can feel a cold burning tingle when using it, and the scent clears the foggiest head. Actually, if you’re not careful, you can actually give yourself quite a shock by getting peppermint oil on sensitive areas of the body. I recommend this product–it’s potent enough to be butch, it’s good soap, and it also has all the hippy, guilt-free, cred you could ever want.

I use it for two reasons–the above, which I summarize as “it’s the Altoids of soap!”, and the fact that it has the craziest label I’ve ever seen on any product.

Will got me thinking about it today when he posted a snippet from an article on the company–an article driven by the upcoming release of a documentary about the company.

It starts like this:

…Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soap, which bears (stoned or stone-cold-sober) perhaps the mother lode of weird label verbiage — with a back-story almost as convoluted as the one behind the Masonic symbols gracing our national currency.

It’s the story of one Dr. Emanuel H. Bronner, chemist, master soap maker, Holocaust survivor and lead prophet for the One God of Spaceship Earth. In 1947, Bronner escaped from a mental institution and began selling soap made from his family’s 150-year-old recipe out of the back of a Los Angeles tenement hotel.

Now, I knew the label was pure-D nuts, but I didn’t previously know that the company was run by an escaped mental patient. That’s awesome. And it does help explain the label.

Other interesting things that the article reveals:

• Bonner “embraced the work of Thomas Paine”. We discussed Tom here earlier.
• Bonner was pals with Eldridge Cleaver. Remember him?
• The company has salary caps for David and Mike Bronner, the current president and vice-president, at no more than five times that of the lowest paid employee. That’s pretty awesome compared to the average, which is apparently more like 430 times.
• The company gives away over 70 percent of its net profit to various causes. This is also pretty awesome, and is even more “walking the walk” than the salary cap.
• I can’t even explain the story about The Germs. You have to go read the article, or else watch the video I’m closing this post with.

And then there’s the label.

Because of his profound spiritual beliefs, the label that bears his name became both his manifesto and his legacy to humanity. It is a 30,000-word treatise on “All-One,” an ever-evolving set of teachings he called “The Moral ABC,” designed, in his words, “to unite all mankind free!”

Here’s what the Canadian version of it looks like (and yes, I did peel that off an old bottle and scan it just for this post):

If you need to get in really close you can download the gigantic version of the label.

The Canadian version is actually less crazy than the American ones, since some of the precious, precious real estate is taken up by the French language translations. You can get PDFs of the American labels, with added extra crazy from the Dr. Bonner’s company web site. (There is other fun crazy at that site, btw. Explore.)

And, to close, this: