It's one of those mundane things we have to do when we move out and live on our own. Buying the things Mom or Dad did for us. You come to regret never paying attention to the things they threw in the shopping cart other than the objects with insane amounts of sugar in them.

I ran out of the Zest I purchased nine months ago and wanted to try something different. To me soap is soap; it cleans off the gunk and spruces up your smell. I don't give a damn if it's infused with 1,428 different herbal, animal, and vegetable extracts formulated to lift and seperate my pores to give me that fresh exfoliated feeling you get when you prance through an Amazonian rainforest. I just want to get clean.

Based on this Simplicity Directive, I gave Ivory Soap a shot. The company makes a big deal about its "99 44/100% Pure Floating Soap" that contains "no heavy perfumes, creams, or dyes." I can't recall using it in the past, so I picked up a three-bar pack a few months ago.

Bah!

Ivory doesn't dry my skin out and leave it scaly. My skin feels fine after a shower. It just looks like tiny flakey Hell. It's as if each of the individual creases in on my skin get's their edges slightly fluffed, resulting in a fine patchwork of flakiness. This happens the worst on my arms.

The soap doesn't lather as well as other soaps in the past. It find myself taking a little more time to get any decent suds ready for cleaning. And even after all this time, I'm still not used to the smell.

So bye-bye, Ivory! I wasn't great knowing you.