Baby-soft
◊ Every time I wash my hair, I get to stand around in the shower with conditioner on my hair for two full minutes. It must be two full minutes, because if I wash out the conditioner early it might retaliate by frizzing my hair or bleaching it Paris Hilton blonde or, even worse, returning my hair to its natural color (augh!).
I try to do the time management thing by shaving my legs or washing my face during those two minutes, but sometimes I end up too distracted by the ad copy on the soap and shampoo and conditioner and body scrub competing for space on a shelf the size of my hand. My body wash says it makes skin "baby soft." I have little experience with children and even less with babies, so I don't actually know how to tell if my skin is baby-soft after I use the stuff.
How do the soap people know their product makes skin baby-soft? They probably have a team of people in lab coats petting babies and rating their skin for softness. If it's a middle-of-the-road kind of soap, they probably settle for an average level of baby-softness, comparing groups of babies and finding the median baby to use as a standard for their product. Those really cheap soaps from the dollar store are probably tested against less-soft babies, like you'd get from people who have dark tans and bleached hair with three inches of black roots showing.
Premium soaps would mean more rigorous testing. People in lab coats would go through large groups of babies, evaluating their skin softness in an effort to find the softest baby. It would be a science: they would rate the friction and flexibility of a baby's skin, factoring in characteristics like downiness and sheen.
But once they found the softest baby, they'd be in trouble. They couldn't keep funneling money into baby R&D; at some point, they would have found the softest baby. But they would be battling against time: every passing day would mean the softest baby would be a little bit less soft. There would be no way to preserve that benchmark of softness.
Unless they turned the baby into leather.
Which forces one to ask: how long until babyskin wallets would hit the high-end luxury market?
And can I get mine in red?