{"id":1808,"date":"2008-11-11T22:11:53","date_gmt":"2008-11-12T02:11:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/?p=1808"},"modified":"2008-11-11T22:13:27","modified_gmt":"2008-11-12T02:13:27","slug":"uncommon-madness-and-the-altoids-of-soap","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/2008\/11\/11\/uncommon-madness-and-the-altoids-of-soap\/","title":{"rendered":"Uncommon Madness and the Altoids Of Soap"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

If you don’t know Dr. Bronner’s, I’m not even sure where to start trying to explain it.<\/p>\n

The short version is this: my shower contains a bottle of liquid peppermint soap<\/a>It’s easy to get in Halifax–even Pete has it.<\/footnote>. 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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

It starts like this:<\/p>\n

\n

…Dr. Bronner\u2019s Magic Soap, which bears (stoned or stone-cold-sober) perhaps the mother lode of weird label verbiage \u2014 with a back-story almost as convoluted as the one behind the Masonic symbols gracing our national currency.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s 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\u2019s 150-year-old recipe out of the back of a Los Angeles tenement hotel.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Other interesting things that the article reveals:<\/p>\n