...Wait, What? I Have to BUY Soap?

I would have bet that I had blogged about this before, and yet if I did, I can't find it, so here goes. It's not a profound story or anything, but it is a story. Or a journey. Something like that.

Way back in 2016, I was washing my hands in a restaurant bathroom and thought, Hmm, this soap actually smells good. Unexpected, right? I looked at the dispenser, and it had a Safeguard logo on it. Safeguard is the bar soap my mother bought when I was a kid, so the smell of it apparently imprinted in me as a "this is what clean smells like" scent. IIRC (ten years later), I had been buying Safeguard liquid soap at some point, but they stopped making it.

So when I got home that day, I did some internet searching to see if it was available again. The answer was a qualified yes: it was on Amazon, but in quantities that were more suited for commercial use than your average home. That's silly, I'm not buying a year's supply of it, I told myself.

Except I kept thinking about it. Finally I told myself, "Why not? No, you don't need two gallons of hand soap. But can you afford the thirty-five bucks right now? Then why not, if it will make you happy?" Little pleasures, right? 

BTW, I just noticed that the container has an expiration date. Apparently I've been using expired soap, is that a thing? Because it has seemed to clean my hands as well as ever, these last nine+ years.

So here I am, in April of 2026, aka ten freaking years later, having just poured the last of it into my dispenser, and thinking, just go ahead and buy it again*. Do I need a ten-year supply of it? No. But it still makes me happy. And honestly, even at an increased cost of $47.20 (plus tax) as of today, with how long I now know it will last, that's quite a deal.
*It seems Safeguard now has a bunch of other, fancier hand soap options, in pretty bottles, but I'm going to stick with the classic. It smells like clean.