Virginia Smith - Clean; A History of Personal Hygiene and Purity (2007).jpg
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According to Smith, ads that pushed cleaning concoctions -- not just for our bodies, but for our laundry and living spaces, too -- blossomed along with the emergence of television during the 1950s. They were ubiquitous enough to inspire a durable nickname for serial daytime dramas, known henceforth as soap operas. Nowadays, Smith notes, soaps, shampoos, polishes and shower gels "are not quite the staple of TV advertising budgets that they were." Still, ads featuring them continue to take hold of our imaginations. I remember, for example, an '80s spot about a deodorant soap. The blue bar's magical lather so invigorated the ad's hero that he dressed eagerly, undeterred by the downpour outside his window. When his sleepy spouse asked him how he expected to get to work in such a deluge, he smiled confidently at the camera and declared, "backstroke."
Of course that ad is tame by more recent standards. Who, for instance, can forget a certain herbal shampoo that promises a "totally organic experience"? In one such ad, the bubbly balm inspired a woman to climb the walls of her shower stall, loudly exclaiming her bliss while her clueless husband listened with concern on the other side of the door. These Madison Avenue productions are meant to convince us that few experiences can be as transporting -- "Calgon, take me away" -- as a serene soak or a sudsy washing-up.
Smith suggests that we really don't need much persuasion. Our belief in the transformative power of a good scrub goes back centuries, the roots of which are carefully detailed in Clean. "The long story of washing and bathing water began in the Neolithic at some indeterminate date," Smith believes. She goes on to show that our almost instinctive devotion to cleanliness has a solid basis in neurology, chemistry and other hard sciences that help us to understand that being groomed not only does away with dirt but also "produces mildly narcotic effects; and the longer it carries on, the more swooning or relaxing effects it achieves." Totally organic indeed.