#1136 Nourish-licious

I recently spent the night at the Great Wolf Lodge. It’s a fun place with lots of cool activities for the whole family. One of the things that sets them apart is a kids spa, where kid-themed things like ice cream pedicures are quite popular.
Every room also has hair and body product amenities for adults and kids.
You know how it is, you go to a fancy hotel and they have variously scented hand creams, shampoos and soap. A deluxe hand cream is so much more luxurious than enough coffee in their tiny little coffee pots to make two tiny little coffee pots worth of coffee. Nothing wakes me up more quickly in the morning than freshly hand-creamed skin.
The interesting thing about the tube of body wash they have for the kids is its scent—bubble gum. Something is desperately wrong with this picture. Bubble Gum hair and body wash.
The last time my skin and hair smelled like bubble gum my mom was cutting it out of said hair. In a massive bubble gum blowing competition with my old brother, he had popped my winning and enormous bubble and it had enveloped my face, head, and shoulders.
So at what point did we start believing we needed to slather our bodies with food scents? The adult body wash the hotel offered was just as bad; it was “warm vanilla.” Ice cream and bubble gum, we may as well take a dip in the pool at the Willy Wonka factory.
I think it comes down to our national obsession with nourishing our skin. As if our skin was something that could deliver actual nutrients to our body.
The kids tube, redolent of the sweet scent of bubble gum, says, “Warning, do not ingest.” Oddly, the warm vanilla adult bodywash tube has no such injunction.
And it doesn’t taste like vanilla, by the way.
So when you were a kid, did you know what “ingest” meant? Ingest is the word for the adult tubes. “Do not eat” would do fine for the kids.
Unless they feel the broader term will also prevent a kid from chugalugging or snorting it...?
America, ya gotta love it.