#677 Unclean Shampoo

So I’m minding my own business taking a shower the other morning and, compulsive reader that I am, I chance to look at my shampoo bottle.
I’ve seen it a million times, but for the first time I notice this statement on the label which says,
“No animal testing.”
And my first thought is, “It’s bad to give animals a shampoo?”
Cause you know, my basic posture in life is to take the simple approach and not expect strange and nefarious things afoot. I find it hard to put together the concept of shampoo and animal torture.
It makes you wonder if PETA activists are even now breaking into shampoo labs across the country and rinsing.
But then my next thought, always deeper and darker, was what kind of harsh and strange chemicals were they thinking of putting on my hair that they’d need to test on animals in the first place?
I mean, I would figure there was a class of shampoo chemicals that had been deemed to be relatively mild and non-carcinogenic at some time in the past and they were just juggling them around by this point.
Let’s see... Jojoba? Probably cool. Aloe Vera? Sounds okay. Lanolin? Keep it light. Hydrochloric acid? Ah, no, let’s skip that one. Carbolic acid enriched with kerosene? Nah, once killed a rodent. Too bad, thought we had a winner with that one.
There goes my mental picture of scientists being smarter than your run-of-the-mill, fifth grade, trial-and-error boy messing with a frog he’s thumb-tacked to a crude dissecting board.
So with all this stuff running through my head, and a little of the shampoo itself running through my eyes, I look a little closer at the shampoo bottle in question.
And sure enough, there’s aloe and jojoba, and a really fancy and expensive new ingredient, purified water. There’s also kelp, rosemary, and that tea that blends in with its surroundings so good, chamomile. But there’s also something called methyl-cloro-iso-thia-zo-linone.
And I think, eleven syllable chemical words scare me.
Maybe it’s time to get a pet.
America, ya gotta love it.