Sweetheart Soap - Addressing the miniature nymph market.

Beauty products often go for the soft sell, often relying on images based on pure fantasy to move product. There can only be so many real reasons to buy soap. there can only be so many different ingredients in soap. Mostly they're just sodium laureth sulfate and glycerine. After that, you're pretty much down to perfume. So, yeah, how to sell your soap in an already crowded marketplace? Make her think she's a tiny naked woman taking a bath in the forest. Or, at least, that's the magic answer the Purex company landed on.

Every woman's fantasy: to bathe in a clawfoot tub, somehow fed with hot and cold return lines in the middle of a forest, where only the bugs can see her perfect nudity.

Something's weird about the composition. The blurry leaves in the foreground - they sort of look like they're close to the camera, but they also look like they're on the same plane as the tub, just really huge. Is this lady six inches tall, bathing in a miniature tub? If so, she's in much more danger doing her washing up in the forest, where even something as small as a squirrel could pose a serious threat... if he decided she had some acorns hidden in her bathwater.

It looks like she's just finished washing, maybe she even had the time to luxuriate in the moment with her Sweetheart soap. But what now? She wraps her towel around herself, and steps out of the tub onto the packed earth floor of the forest primeval. Now her foot's dirty. Maybe even a few bugs have crawled onto her. She then needs to make her way back to her house/tent/yurt/quonset hut/bivouac/internment camp to apply moisturizer and makeup or something. Where's her makeup table? On the top of a mountain, or maybe in a subterranean cavern? She must be in her bathroom if she's in the tub. Maybe her toilet is just out of shot? Let's give her the benefit of the doubt and assume that, while she has spent the money to run plumbing out into the forest, she's kept all the bathroom fixtures close together. I mean, she's not crazy, right?

How luxurious is it sitting on the pot in the forest? Her husband pounding on a nearby tree. "Are you gonna be in the forest all damn day? Our reservations are at eight!" "Almost finished dear!" she calls. "Just fending off a bear, and then I'm all done. Oh, honey... could you bring me my pink hair clip? I think it's in the Himalayas." Her husband, already irritated that she's taking so long, now has to charter a helicopter to mount an expedition to retrieve her pink hair clip... IF that's where she left it! She thinks it's in the Himalayas, grumble grumble. Goddam CH-47 cargo chopper just to get her hair clip, grumble grumble grumble. Lost six men last time because she thought she left her purse in the laundry room, in an active volcano.

Man, luxuriousness must be a lot of work! That better be some good soap.