5 Everyday Things You Should Stop Buying
We’ve all been there. You’re standing in the grocery store with a bottle of [type A] in your left hand and [type B] in your right, trying to make the Sophie’s Choice of which one to buy. Your eyes dart left and right as you try to decipher the inscrutable difference between the two and select the best one to buy. Overwhelmed by the excess of choice, you drop both bottles and grasp the collar of a passing store employee. “By Odin’s beard!” you exclaim, “I just want to know which one of these is best for cleaning a blood-stained smock!”
With so many product lines expanding into useless periphery, sometimes we need to ignore the greedy upsell of marketers and get back to basics. This article will show you some products that cross the line and remind you that no, most of the time you don’t, in fact, want fries with that.
5. Scented Detergents
We can understand some scented cleaning products. We’ll give mountain mist dryer sheets and lemon Pledge a pass, but who’s buying this potpourri scented dish soap? We’re no uber-hausfraus, but we’re pretty sure we understand the basic premise of cleaning stuff around the home, and isn’t the whole idea of washing dishes to clean off everything and make it sterile for eating again? If I wash my dishes and they end up smelling of oranges, rainforest leprechaun leavings or green apple hobopourri, i’m inclined to think they are not, in fact, clean. Clean dishes should not smell like anything, pleasant or otherwise.
Let’s back up a step and get a little scienmotific here. Now don’t lose consciousness, we’ll only go to middle school level science, so hold onto your pocket protectors and don’t take that second afternoon toke just yet. Pretty much all cleaning agents work by the same mechanism, which is the magic of the detergent molecule. It has a hydrophilic/oleophobic head and hydrophobic/oleophilic tail, which means the tail sticks into oil (dirt) and the head sticks to water, which then carries away the dirt during a wash. Simple. That is literally all you need to clean something. You can use a bar of soap, shampoo, or what-have-you. The rest of the list of ingredients is made up of various chemicals to add lather, acidity, moisture, or these harassing perfumes. My beef is that the perfume remains behind, meaning you haven’t cleaned your dishes. Adding fragrance to detergent is like adding hobo blood to surgical alcohol, or, you know, perfume to your food.
4. Skin Creams and Beauty Products
If there’s anyone who experiences simultaneous awe andvagina-dehydrating revulsion of science, it’s your average North American woman (source: science). Advertisers know this, and will employ some borderline insulting tricks. Watch almost any commercial for a skin cream and you’ll hear them invent bullshit sciencey sounding names for their products’ claims. I’m not entirely unsympathetic to the plight of the marketer; after all they are tasked with reinventing the wheel of your basic lotion and shampoo every year since the 1800s. But you can tell they are running on creative fumes when you start hearing egregious claims like repairing “skin disorganization”. I wish I had the link for that one, but I swear on a pile of peptides that’s a real term I heard. Seriously. Think about that term for a second. Do you know what would happen if your cells were actually disorganized from their natural structure? I don’t, but i imagine it would look horribly similar to a transporter accident on Star Trek.
Aarrgh! If only I’d moisturized with Olay™!
Sadly I couldn’t find that particular ad on YouTube, but here is a similar one. Oh, hold the phone! These guys have a “Wrinkle Protocol”. That’s serious business, you guys. Protocol.
3. Shampoo
Similar to #4 but these ads have their own vocabulary of nonsense to make fun of.
2. Gasoline
Ok you do need to buy gas, but what type? You should get the best, right? Well hold on there, fancy-pants, because I'm going to tell you that gas is gas. Depending on the weather in your area and time of year, a different additive package is used for optimal combustion. Service station franchises also have their own little additives but it’s basically detergent (we meet again, old friend) to clean your pipes (heheh...) but you’re really not getting anything worth paying extra for. As for octane levels, your car’s user manual may tell you to use the premium stuff, but that’s just to make you feel like you have a fancy car. Modern engines are computerized to burn any fuel at the appropriate mixture, with the higher octane fuels only improving performance of older cars. If your car was made before the 1990s and has a carburetor, go ahead and buy the top grade fuel. But if your car is fairly modern and fuel injected, you’re probably fine with the basic stuff.
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1. Detoxes & Cleanses
(unfinished) Discuss how the body itself forms toxins rather than ingesting them, then how your body cleanses itself without intervention.
