Lily White and Pure
Know what’s been really bothering me since early 1995? Ivory Soap. Ivory soap really pisses me off. And the strange thing is, when I was a kid, I used to love the stuff. For some reason, the fact that a bar of Ivory floated on top of the water was the coolest thing about bath-time (except maybe the time my little brother announced, "Boys have hotdogs, girls have cracks…." That was some funny shit). What bothers me now about Ivory is their slogan: "99 and 44/100ths pure." Who the hell came up with that? First of all, doesn’t the word "pure" connote complete purity, the whole ballgame? Can something only be partially pure? I mean, isn’t dog-shit partially pure? And where do they come up with the fraction? 44/100… they couldn’t have gone with 99.5? I mean, that’s some precise calculations. "We’d like our soap to be pure, but we got it within 0.0056, that’s pretty good right?" If I were the president of Ivory, I would’ve been pissed… I would’ve said, "Get your asses back in the lab until you hit 100% !" That would have forced those soap scientists to clean up their act. ‘
So what is in that other 56/100ths? If the rest is pure, than logically that last fraction must be impure. But nobody asks about it. And since they couldn’t justify saying 100 percent pure, maybe that last 56/100ths is severely impure, you know, like battery acid. Maybe that’s actually how Ivory Soap works, one little squirt of Sulfuric acid scours the skin nice and clean. And if that’s the case, what’s the other 99 44/100ths for? To make it float I suppose. What a piss off.
posted by The Artsaypunk @ 4:10 PM
2 comments
2 Comments:
This post made me curious, so I googled it and found out what those impurities were. It's more of a marketing ploy than anthing, as there's no real way to define what, "pure" is in soap. One of the creaters of Ivory wanted something to distinguish itself from the other soaps around, so he took it to a New York scientific consultant. He found that the soap consisted of, "99 and 44/100% fatty acids and alkali" Now, knowing that wouldn't make a great marketing slogan, the creator of ivroy dropped the "fatty acids and alkali" for "pure". The other 56/100 "consisted of uncombined alkali, 0.11%; carbonates, 0.28%; and mineral matter, 0.17%. Total: 0.56%." So now you know the rest of the story.
Actual Article
Yeah, I came across this in my Ivory research as well, but I choose to ignore it, in that I prefer to preserve my groundless hatred of Ivory Soap.
Still, you gotta admit, the whole story's still a bit sketchy.
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