On the Importance of Being Couth

This summer, I bought a 6 pack of green tea and cucumber soap, the last bar of which I am using as we speak. Well, not exactly as we speak, but within 10 minutes at least. I still have one bar of old person soap left. Hygiene is not my forte. I cleanse myself often, though with no particular intelligent design behind my actions.

Into the mix dove my trendy cousins’ trendy mother with a contribution, undoubtedly from whichever department store she has the most substantial employee discount. I don’t really know what to make of it. One of the “tubes” is an aftershave – which might come in handy roughly twice a week, though probably only once, as I am strong-smell-aphobic. The other is a fragrant “bath-shower & shampoo gel”. For whatever it’s worth, the brand is “Dolce & Gabbana”. It is “pour homme”, which means “for men” in case anyone is even less cultured than I.

I’m a little bit confused by this. It is clearly not designed for wholesale use, the tube is not particularly large. But it says that it is “shampoo” which makes me think that perhaps I’m supposed to clean my hair with it, seeing as how that is what one does with shampoo. Deciding that I needed to try it to find out, I did. Just now, when I used the green tea and cucumber soap.

Not wanting to engulf my hair in an invisible torch of odor, I decided to wash my (recently cut) hair with regular shampoo first, then throw this in afterwards. I put a little dab and sloshed it in. Nothing monumental happened. It was very disappointing. I was hoping it would at least tingle, possibly burn, hopefully make me immediately more virile – in such a small tube one would assume it has some magical potency. But no, it just smells vaguely like the aftershave. So maybe some 6’6 woman will walk past and catch a whiff of my pleasantly fragranced coif of hair. I don’t know. I wonder if it cured my split ends, if I have them. Actually, if I did, they’re all on the floor of the hair cuttery right now.

Speaking of which, I went to the, err, non-caucasian hair cuttery, which never has as long a wait. I swear as I was sitting waiting for a complicated combination of hair weaves to be completed one of them said to the other “who’s going to do the ‘ethnic’ haircut?” I doubt they were referring to me (seeing as how I was right there, and not deaf either), but I like to make believe that they were. Comparatively, I was the aberrant ethnicity – I can’t imagine white folk hair is hard to cut, I just have them use the trimmer on the side and make the top half as long as it starts out as.