With the lockdown in full swing, I thought it would be a good opportunity to review something I just started using quite a lot of in my summer showers. Pears soap!
I’m normally a Cinthol guy (review of that coming soon), but I’ve been wanting to try the Pears soap bar for a while now. I remember using it as a child and the smell always seemed to stick with me. Nostalgia galore, I opened the Pears packet when my trusty lemon scented Cinthol bar had finally washed me for the last time.
The imagery on the Pears box is quite exquisite I must say. The amber oval bar sitting effortlessly on a puddle. If I was the designer that created this packaging, I’d be quite proud. It always gave me the vibe of that rock from Jurassic Park that had the mosquito with the dinosaur blood. The amber color with the classy Pears font embossing and the white background color pairing adds some oomph.
Opening it was quite effortless as it was a laminated cardboard material, the kind that has a satisfying peel with that crispy crunchy sound. Good god. Someone do ASMR with that please. After getting through the outer box, the majestic Pears bar rolls out in a translucent plastic. On a side note, c’mon Pears. It’s 2020 for Christ’s sake. Can we stop it with the plastic? The last thing I want is a turtle choking because I wanted to soap my ass.
Complaint aside, the wrap is quite easy to tear. When you finally hold this 90’s nostalgia induced bar of soap, you’re hit by that trademark smell.
What does it smell like? Glad you asked. Have you ever smelled something so good that your mouth wants to take a bite of it? But you can’t. It’s a bar of soap unfortunately. It smells like a rose had sex with Old Spice aftershave and then their baby slept in a lavender sauna for a week. It smells fantastic.
The thing that makes this smell so classy is that it plays hard to get. It doesn’t explode your nose with the scent. The key word is ‘subtle’. Imagine a VO artist whispering into your teeny ears, “S..u..b..t..l..e”.
While the smell is fantastic, holding the actual soap is almost perfect. The best way I can describe it is when you see a painting on a wall and it’s almost even. It looks perfectly even but your brain keeps telling you it’s off. It’s that feeling when I hold this soap. Maybe it’s my hands. I do have big hands. Or maybe, just maybe, Pears committed the classic product sin. Form over function. Most soaps are rectangular for a reason. It’s easier to grip. An oval soap is asking to be dropped in a shower. And you know what they say about dropping the soap. It creases it! It touches the bathroom floor as well, gross.
When you lather this soap, since it’s a glycerine soap, it takes a tad bit more effort to spread it across your body. This isn’t a complaint as such. But it is an effort.
Washing off the lather felt odd to me. When you wash off Cinthol lather, there’s a sense of definitiveness that your body feels. The skin feels clean, like the soap has given you a stamp of cleanliness. With Pears, it feels akin to applying that stamp by licking it instead of using fevicol. It doesn’t give you the complete sense of cleanliness. Which I find is quite important when you take a bath.
The lather washes off to an almost perfect level but again, there’s an added effort that needs to be put. It doesn’t give me the sense of security that the soap is all gone when the water washes it off. The last thing you want to feel is that you’ve done a half assed job washing yourself when it’s actually the soap’s fault. Once dried off, I had to really stuff my nose into my skin to smell the aroma. Here’s where the subtlety doesn’t help. I want to smell like a guy who’s taken a shower. I deserve the acknowledgement that comes with it. This soap robs me out of it.
Grievance aside, here are the takeaways from my review of the Pears soap. It’s a classy, cool, subtle soap that gets the job done without making a hurrah. Is it worth the Rs.40 asking price? Yes, it certainly is.
I give it 3 out of 5 stars.
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