William, yesterday evening, bringing up plans for this evening (the night of the U.S. primary elections, which could change the course of history in numerous ways): “Mom, I’m assuming your plan is ‘Sleeping Pill at 6:00pm’? That’s probably my plan.” That had NOT been my plan, but now I’m thinking maybe it’s my plan.
Let’s find a distraction, other than emailing my high school boyfriend, which I also did. I would like to talk about How Our Parents Stock Their Showers. I could work on that title, but not right now.
When I visit my parents, there are three total products in the shower—already a sharp contrast to my shower at home, which has somewhere between twenty and thirty, because I am a faithless product wench and will buy almost anything that looks interesting, and because I find “getting to choose which shampoo/conditioner/bodywash to use today” a useful tool in my depression-warding-off toolkit. My parents have:
1. Ivory bar soap
2. Prell shampoo
3. Pantene Sheer Volume conditioner, in the big pump bottle
Items 1 and 2 are EXACTLY THE SAME as what we had all through my childhood. (Two Gen X Kid markers: “watching the beautiful green bubble go up and down in the Prell bottle,” and “admiring the letters pressed into a new bar of Ivory, and noticing as they gradually disappeared.”) I remember when conditioner (then called “creme rinse” if I remember correctly) came to our house in the ’80s, and it CHANGED MY LIFE. Suddenly I could JUST COMB MY HAIR, instead of having to yank through the squeaky Prell tangles. I am pretty sure we had the absolute cheapest one on the market (VO5?) but NO MATTER, it did the trick. (I’d have to ask, but my GUESS is that my mom thinks of Pantene as Expensive Conditioner, and that she skimps when she uses it to make it last longer.)
I will note that my new shorter springier haircut (have we already talked about this? I gave the stylist free rein within certain limits, and she cut off 15 inches and put in tons of layers, and now it’s wavy/bumpy in a way some people react to as if it is curly, but I have seen too many of those “IS YOUR HAIR SLIGHTLY FRIZZY?? IT IS ACTUALLY SECRETLY CURLY!!!” reels to give in to that story)…where was I going with this sentence? Oh yes: my new shorter springier haircut THRIVED on the Prell/Pantene combination. It may have stripped all that was good and holy out of my hair, but my hair was ON BOARD with that. A good hair day every day. I remember experiencing the same thing in the early ’90s, combining disappointing “spiral perms” with Pert Plus: it was the closest those perms ever got to spiraling. All my careful moisturizing and damage-repair just made my hair LANK, but the caustic powers of a shampoo marketed as “odor-fighting” and “for men!” worked MAGIC.
I would like to know, with the intensity of a hundred thousand elections, what YOUR parents keep in THEIR shower, and what you remember about the shower/bath products of your youth—and how it compares to what YOU keep in YOUR shower now.
I can’t help with the actual specifics of “what my parents keep in the shower” because they’re both gone now, but I do know that their shower was similarly sparse. But what I came here to say is that it WAS, 100%, “creme rinse,” and the beautiful green bubble in the bottle of Prell was 100% a part of my Gen X child/teenhood as well, and it has been decades since anyone has mentioned either one but I think about them probably more frequently than I really should.
In my parents’ shower (now just my dad’s, alas):
Ivory soap–check
Prell–check
Also: Johnson’s Baby Shampoo (my dad’s hair is thin and delicate like a baby’s)
In the guest shower:
One can of Barbasol shaving cream with a rusted bottom that MIGHT date to my high school days and smells faintly of generic grandpa
2-3 plastic disposable razors from the same era
A few bottles of Aussie shampoo and conditioner that definitely date to my slightly younger sister’s high school days
A bar of homemade lye soap from the annual pioneer days (many, many annum ago) (lye soap supposedly cuts through poison ivy oil)
I feel like this post absolutely unlocked elementary/ middle/ high school memories. I had not thought about Prell/ Pert/ Pantene/ Vo5 (Vo5!) in YEARS, nay decades until now. I, too, remember when conditioner arrived on the scene as a revelation. My mother DEFINITELY considers Pantene the expensive conditioner and adds water when it gets low to stretch it. We also loved a two-in-one shampoo and conditioner back in the day, for we were cheap AND uneducated.
Like you, I am now a faithless product wench and buy whatever looks fun. I do buy bumble and bumble when it’s on sale and I have a lot of Ulta points so that I get a good price. And I will say that Trader Joe’s new line of hair and face products are really good. I’ve been freely indulging in those because they are cheap and good.