Wyn Drabble: Bathroom jargon won't wash

Wyn Drabble.

I feel truly blessed to live in this day and age.

I base this on some of the products currently in use in our household, particularly the bathroom. If ever you feel the need to marvel at mankind's progress, take a closer look at some of the consumables in your bathroom.

In our shower, for example, I spotted bathroom cleaning cream "with microparticles". I squinted at some of the cream but was unable to spot any - that's how micro they are. In my childhood, microparticles had not been invented so people just had to battle on without them.

There is also a hair-care product called "stylin' texture clay". We used to have only Brylcreem or Bay Rum and would never have imagined that there would one day be a product so cool that it could replace its final g with an apostrophe. And clay would have been out of the question.

There are also two products which are paraben-free though neither of the makers knows about hyphens so the toothpaste is "paraben free" and the shampoo is "paraben free". Hyphens may well come in future versions of the packaging but until that happens we will need to overlook the error and just enjoy the benefits of not having any paraben.

For those who don't know what paraben is, I can report that it is a class of preservatives used in cosmetic and pharmaceutical products. Chemically, parabens are a series of parahydroxybenzoates or esters of parahydroxybenzoice acid (source: paraben-free Wikipedia - now with microparticles). Well, you asked!

Our certified organic rosehip oil (for scars, stretch marks, fine lines and wrinkles) boasts on the packaging that it is "powerfully natural". As it "nourishes and repairs", one may well feel forces at work.

Such products help us live a more relaxed lifestyle. Only a century and a half ago, snake oil salesmen toured USA selling products to help almost every health problem ever experienced by human beings. But they were frauds.

Not that there haven't been recent frauds too. The makers of "Speak" were recently exposed; they had claimed that their soft gel capsules aided speech development in children as early as the first week.

AcneApp was a phone app which claimed to clear acne by sending coloured lights from a smart phone or other mobile device to the affected area. Being paraben-free was not enough to save it from being busted.

But back to the products in our bathroom. The hand cream seems to spend as much time boasting about what it does not contain ("no parabens, no silicons, no colourants, no mineral oils) as what it does contain (alpha-isomethyl ionone among others). Did you spot their cunning way of evading the hyphen issue?

The use of Latin certainly inspires confidence. The first listed ingredient is "aqua". Now, that's what I call authoritative!

We wash our hands with "foaming shea butter hand soap". It starts out as a reasonably clear liquid but, as you press the nozzle, it emerges as white foam. It truly is a miracle of our times. To think that once we only had a cake of soap. But the one that really takes the cake is our new toilet seat which is - you're not going to believe this but it's true - "self-lowering". In our day we had to lower the seat ourselves.

It's not entirely automatic, you have to get it started manually to get it on its way but after that you can just stand back with your arms folded and relax as it finds its own way down to the closed position.

It truly is a remarkable age we live in.

- Wyn Drabble is a teacher of English, a writer, musician and public speaker.