Went into the bathroom this morning to wash my face, and discovered that the Standard Nonthreatening Blue Soap is down to the unusuable splinter size.

I have, as it happens, two other bars of soap. Gifts from my mother, the mastermind behind the maple syrup bath wash that makes the user smell like an International House of Pancakes. They have been lurking since Christmas, stacked in a small, menacing tower on the counter, the Soap of Potential Doom.

Still, I am bound to boldly go, etc. I reached for the first one, a glittery pink-purple number shaped like a sunflower, but which proclaims itself to be “Sugar Plum/Poinsettia” flavor. Ah. Shaped like a sunflower. Not like a poinsettia. (I’ll give it a free pass on looking like a sugar plum, since I haven’t a clue what that looks like.) It was indeed very glittery. I slit the plastic wrap (and I should really had dried my hands first, because getting wet plastic wrap off increasingly damp soap is kinda tricky.)

I suppose at some point it should have occurred to me that glitter occurring in a soap will translate into glitter appearing on your skin, but I was not one of those teenagers who went in for glitter-as-fashion-accessory and so have little experience in its use as anything other than an adjunct to glue and dried macaroni. So blinking into the mirror and seeing the little fragmented highlights came as a bit of a surprise. On the one hand, it’s a handy method to make sure you really did get every last molecule of soap off your skin. On the other hand…glitter.

Tune in next week for more Adventures With Weird Bath Products! (It’s probably as well that I never quite mastered the art of nine-tenths of the cosmetics out there, or there’d be some truly bizarre reports coming in. “This green facial powder is meant to correct blemishes and diminish those pesky black eyes, but I’m gonna see if I can use it to look like a zombie!”)