Yesterday, we visited our local organic farm, where we’ve been buying fresh produce and the occasional chicken for the last 10 years or so. Nice people and very nice products. The owner sometimes allows other vendors of natural products to display their wares, and today a husband and wife team of soap-makers had their goods on parade. My wife chose a bar soap and I, coincidentally having run out of body wash the day before, bought a bottle of their liquid shower soap.

I used it for the first time this morning. Flipping the dispenser lid produced a not too promising odor which had nothing to do with the Coconut/Citrus marked on the bottle. The color of the liquid coming out of the bottle can only be described as a cross between caramel and diarrhea. I applied this almost tar-scented concoction to my hair and noticed that while it hardly produced any foam, it managed to effectively strip the oils out leaving what little hair I have feeling dry rather than clean. I had to soak my loofah (a puff really, but it would hardly be manly to call it that) twice with this foul liquid, in order to get enough lather to wash the heavily forested landscape of my corpulence. Again, the soap left a nasty dry feeling rather than one of being clean.

During this brief cleansing process I also noticed that the label had begun to disintegrate in my hands, so I quickly opened the shower door and placed the bottle on the toilet top. Strangely, I felt dirtier than when I started and had to begin anew with my trusty Neutragena shampoo and my son’s Irish Spring Body Wash. But as I re-lathered myself, from the corner of my eye and looking through the glass shower doors, I could see that the label had continued its disintegration by leaking all its dark blue ink onto our new white Kohler toilet! It struck me that these bastards had printed the f*#ing labels on their ink-jet printer at home!!! Scrambling out of the shower covered in lather, I managed to gingerly pick up this bottle of crap and throw it directly into the garbage can (luckily already filled with discarded tissues, etc. to soak up the leakage). I then wiped the toilet top clean, visions of my apoplectic wife’s head ready to explode, dancing in my mind.

The moral of this story: Natural doesn’t necessarily mean good.

Sub-moral: Entrepreneurship isn’t for everyone!