I have a houseguest staying with me in Chicago this week. He got off a long flight, got to my apartment, and walked into my bathroom for a long-awaited shower. I heard some rattling around in the bathroom. It sounded like a raccoon in a dumpster. Finally my guest emerged with his hands up, frustrated, my bathroom turned upside-down: "Where's your goddamn shampoo? And don't you have any soap?" "Of course," I said, pointing to what looked like a cow pie on the side of the tub. "That's my solid licorice shampoo." "That's not shampoo," he protested, "that's just plain poo." I've been obsessed with bath products since I was an eight year old with no ostensible need for thigh-firming oatmeal soaks. But recently, the line between bath products and food products has been blurring. At Lush, a "fresh" cosmetics company, you ask the salespeople to carve you hunks off of huge wheels of soap like so much Tome de Savoie. You pay by weight, and they bundle your wedge in butcher's paper, emitting perfumes like honey, cocoa, figs, or extra virgin olive oil. They also have non-foodstuff-related products, but I always seem to be drawn to the nearly edible. I've purchased a shampoo containing organic stout, which gets me slurring my words first thing in morning, even before I've put the Courvoisier in my oat bran. That said, you can go overboard. At Chicago's Aroma Workshop, customers build their own delicious products out of hundreds of isolated perfumes like black pepper, grapefruit, and basil, and have the scents mixed into various products such as soap or lotion. I once stopped by with a line-cook friend of mine. He selected a couple of his favorite scents: lime, lemongrass, pepper, clove, and so on. Eventually he created a massage oil that smelled exactly like Pad Thai. I showed my guest around the unmarked chunks in my shower caddy: blackberry-almond soap, soy-brown-sugar bath, avocado conditioner, etc. "Where's the lentil soup mouthwash?" he asked sarcastically. Good call. I'm going to give him a Peking duck to rub himself down with and see what happens.
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