Ah, yes - Dial soap. One of the first deodorant soaps (so the ads say - in theory, all soap would be deodorant soap). My parents liked that one, hence, once I was away from home and able to buy my own soap - I bought Dial. Until I smelled more interesting soaps that roommates were buying and from there all hell broke loose in my soap buying. In New York City I tracked down the Caswell Massey store and bought fancy English and European soaps. In other parts of the country I found Crabtree and Evelyn. And as I found those soap dispensaries, you can also track a line of businesses that went out of business because I must have been the only one buying soap there. Now I prowl the aisles of the Vitamin Shoppe and World Market and my local Halal import market to find any soap that (drum roll, please) doesn't have coconut products. Because after many years of wondering, I finally figured out that I've harbored an allergy to coconut (sodium laurelth sulfate, the first or second ingredient - yup - it's coconut - and about 3 dozen more scientific-sounding names). Now I buy soaps made with olive oil, with shay butter, with Dead Sea salts (and look like they're chunks of dirt) and unlike Dial, they are lavender or patchouli . . .

Got a little carried away.