Drawing by Martha Rosenberg.
If you are online or on TV and radio you can’t miss it: personal care corporations telling you that you stink. Just trying to sell products. Even if you are using deodorant on “those places,” your body smells all over say a disturbing number of ads. And, if you smell all over, you are probably contaminating your sofa, chairs and whole house with “odor transfer” say these ads–a Madison Avenue concocted problem like “Ring Around the Collar” and “Visible Panty Line.” And that’s not all. Since you smell, after you launder your clothes, they likely still smell. Help!
Television used to be so dominated by soap ads–Tide, Breeze, Gain–it launched the term “soap opera,” which is still in use. But we are witnessing a resurgence. Exhibit one of the revived “Soap Wars” may be the ads for Downy Rinse & Refresh which resurrect the boy band the Backstreet Boys. But the manic ads for dryer sheets–“It’s the Sheets!”—and Tide’s marketing of a “Free and Gentle” product are Exhibits two and three.
Health Hazards, Sexism and Harm to Poor Countries
Dryer sheets are linked to toxic chemicals and even carcinogens according to published health reports. But that doesn’t mean that fabric softeners are any safer. They “are composed of noxious chemicals combined with a hefty dose of synthetic fragrance chemicals,” says Ecology Works. “Since these harsh chemicals permeate the clothing, they gradually enter the body through the skin and lungs. Alarmingly, many of these chemicals can directly affect the nervous system and endocrine system, and can contribute to respiratory irritation, asthma, and chronic illnesses.
“These fragrance chemicals have been designed to cling to fabric fibers [wait! Like “odor”?] so that the signature scent stays on the clothing long after it’s been washed and dried,” continues Ecology Works. “In fact, it may take as many as twelve to fifteen wash cycles to completely remove the chemical residue from your clothing, bedding, and linens.”
According to Rae Alexandra of KQED, many of the original soap ads were overtly sexist After World War II. “America suddenly had to figure out how to get a nation of Rosie the Riveters back off the payroll and into the kitchen,” she wrote and “the twin forces of capitalism and advertising were immediately employed to convince women that household chores were just as appealing as saving America had been.”
And, according to Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), chemicals like benzene, many harm poorer countries too.
Procter & Gamble sources its wood pulp and palm oil from climate-critical forests in the Canadian boreal and southeast Asia, says the not-for-profit. The products, “from over a thousand mills in Indonesia and Malaysia,” are linked to ongoing “land rights abuses, the destruction of lowland rainforests and peatlands and suppliers operating illegal plantations in Indonesia.”
Questions Remain
Several questions remain about the revived soap wars. Why does Procter & Gamble sell its “Free and Gentle” Tide against its harsher, original product instead of amending the original ingredients in the original or even pulling the product from the market? (It was so harsh it merited the creation of a gentler product?)
Will people really expose themselves to harmful chemicals because a TV pitchman tells them they stink?
And finally–if soap wars have taken over the advertising space, aren’t “Ask Your Doctor” ads carrying the TV news revenue freight anymore?
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