Laughing from my sickbed about my beloved Dove....

I began my last post with the words, "Color me lazy," because I've lived the 
vast majority of my life with little more than Dove soap.  But suddenly I 
realize that I'm not the only "lazy" person out there who's my age, from the era 
when we cared so much about makeup, but really did not worry too much about our 
skin.  

Thank heavens most of us were using Dove soap, now called Dove "beauty bar" in 
order to reach/grab the beauty business.  I've seen that it's now winning awards 
in "best of" lists for magazines such as InStyle.  But the dirty little secret 
here: the Dove we used back in the '60's and '70's is not the Dove of today.  
Believe or not, but our's was much better.  It's been reformulated over the 
years and that's just plain lousy!  Many of us old-timers are spending a lot of 
time lamenting the demise of the old Dove and get more than a bit upset when our 
hubbies accidentally bring home a huge lot of the wrong kind of Dove, like the 
new sensitive editions, exfoliating versions and so forth.  The newly 
reformulated Dove we can sort of live with but the new kinds out there?  Don't 
even get us started!  And what, we wonder, ever happened to the 1/4 moisturizing 
cream of the ads and commercials of yore?  Like I said, don't even get us 
started!

Dove has now spread out to dozens and dozens of products in an effort, I suppose, 
to stay in business with all the face cleansers out there today.  Around the 
time I was in eighth grade, Dove's only competitor seemed to be Noxema, and who 
even remembers Noxema today?  Pond's is still around but that seemed to be a 
product our moms used.  Oil of Olay was a competitor too and I remember using 
that lovely pale pink lotion in a glass bottle on my face for a while, loving 
the smell of it, buying it only when it was on sale because those were our salad 
years when hubby and I could barely manage the rent.  Sooo silly because I 
didn't really need it.  Dove took care of everything, and anything extra I put 
on my face usually caused a small bout of bumps of one sort or another to come 
out as if to warn me what would happen if I even thought of using anything but 
my beloved Dove.

When the Soviet Union fell apart, I flew to visit my cousin in '96, a time 
when Russia was suffering severe shortages of everything from basic aspirin to 
basic food.  Along with candy for her grandchildren I carried many, many bars of 
Dove as a treat for my cousin.  Can you tell I love the stuff?  (And yes, I did 
bring those precious medicines that they needed back then...I'm not completely 
superficial!)

In the hospital I once made the huge mistake of showering with the soap they had 
there - a reputable brand - and within five minutes I started to scratch all 
over.  By the time I called hubby to quickly bring over some Dove from home, 
rashes were setting in.  It was a nasty picture.  I'd never used anything but 
Dove even on my children as babies, having made many a convert to Dove over the 
decades, but from that hospital moment on, I haven't even traveled anywhere but 
with my Dove.  My cousin in Russia, I felt, deserved no less.

My BFF - a term I'm not overly fond of because visions of Paris Hilton and 
Nicole Ricci bounce in my head - and I so love Dove that when she went on her 
first big trip to Europe with her hubby she actually calculated exactly how much 
Dove she needed to bring with her to carry herself and her hubby through those 
weeks but not have any to bring back home with her either.  (And people wonder 
why we've been best friends for over 41 years?)  She knew Dove's properties so 
well that her calculations were right down to the very last day away from home.  
When we traveled to England and later to Paris, we just grabbed however much we 
thought we needed and then some.  By the time Linda went to Europe with her 
hubby, the airlines were cracking down on how much weight and how much luggage 
could be brought with us.  Such a shame!

As I'm discovering a whole world of new CATEGORIES of beauty products (more on 
that to come) I realize that we were so lucky to have had Dove.  It was an era 
of getting as tanned as could be, even if some of us (read pale-skinned me) 
couldn't tan but burn to lobster red.  Dove, which I still use religiously, I 
have a feeling will never be substituted, that is, if they more or less stick 
to their old formula.  My other products may come and go, but my Dove, I hope, 
will be here to stay.