The mention of various soaps and cleansers suggests an observation that should be in everyone's knowledge base.

There is a tremendous market for new bathroom cleansers. This is because everything you use as a cleanser leaves its own residue.

When you find a bit of dingy film that won't come off with the cleanser you're using, you need a new miracle cleanser, and the new stuff actually - sometimes - does remove the old scum and everything is bright and shiny again.

Unfortunately, the new cleanser also leaves its own faint residue; and it's sort of a fact of life that no cleanser removes its own scum. After a few uses, it just doesn't seem to work any more, so you need a new miracle cleanser to remove the residue from the former miracle, ...

Few people seem inclined to check whether, once the new miracle product has removed the old residue, the old product will once again work as before - at least for a while, so we have a never ending parade of repackagings of the same three or four products with new names and higher prices.

Once in a while someone suggests "my granny usta'..." and the cycle gets a brief restart; but it's largely a matter of changing the color, adding or subtracting a foamant, floculant, dispersant, detergent, or a bit of perfume to what granny used and charging a lot more than it used to cost granny.

John