October 6, 2008

  • When doing good looks bad

    And I do mean "looks" in the aesthetic sense here.

    I've been trying to lighten my bag, since me staying in one place for three months didn't really help me keep my possessions containable in one backpack, large though it be. Even after storing a bag with a friend, getting rid of clothes that I didn't need anymore, sending home a package (good think I love my winter coat, since the package containing it cost me over $100 to send back), and throwing out any bit of packaging, paper or whatnot I could, my backpack still weighs a ton. Not enough to be oversized for the plane, but enough that my back complains whenever I make it haul the sucker.

    A sad amount of weight is held in my toiletry bag. Not cosmetics, but moisturizers, facial cleansers, hair product, dental care, contact care, etc. And even that I've gone through and purged what I could bring myself to part with, which admittedly wasn't much.

    In an effort to save space and weight, when I ran out of my last bottle of body wash, I decided to go ahead and buy a bar of soap instead. I even spent a bit extra and bought the fancy-schmancy goats' milk soap with aloe vera from a stall at the Arts Centre Market, rather than a plain ol' bar of Dial (or the NZ equivalent, anyway) from the supermarket.

    I'm not impressed or pleased.

    My poor skin is drying out - even with the application of body lotion once a day, and even more than it would be because of the cold weather. The bar doesn't produce nearly enough lather, and I have to keep resoaping my bath puff. Plus it's made a mess in my bag; I started keeping the soap in a baggie to avoid this, but it's already too late, and it means the bar never really dries out, so there's a bunch of soap residue getting left in the baggie. Plus, I can already tell the bar won't last as long as a bottle of body wash does.

    I liked the idea of using something more environmentally friendly and without packaging, but I think it's just not going to work out. So back to the body wash I'll go, and I'll just have to make sure I recycle the packaging. Ah well, at least I tried. *sigh*