Sweet-Scented Bath Goodies Are A Guilt-Free Meal

I am addicted to bath products. My otherwise-Spartan apartment houses a bathroom exploding with the stuff: scrubs and mousses, beads and foams, creams and lotions, sprays and sprinkles. Most were given to me, some were treats I bought myself, and all share a common denominator: they smell like food.

Some years ago, it would have taken effort to assemble even a small hamper of bath products worthy of the warning label "Smells good enough to eat--but don't!" I entertained fantasies of opening a store devoted entirely to bath and body products fragranced like food. Sugar Suds, I'd call it. And then, after reading a novel by Ruth Rendell set in England decades ago, I changed it to Skinfood, which was what they called moisturizers in those days. Shelf after shelf would be lined with products with improbably delicious scents: soaps that could be mistaken for bars of chocolate, moisturizers as puffy and sugary as whipped cream, body lotions that captured the essence of angel-food cake, soy milk, or a fresh green salad.

Now you would be hard-pressed to find bath products that don't smell like food. Philosophy's Cookbook shampoos and body washes, OPI's Avojuice lotions, the Body Shop's fruit and nut Body Butters--the feeling I have toward these products, the surge of emotional gratification they give me, is hard to explain. They seem to fill an emptiness that actual food never could. It's like being able to consume one dessert after another without the guilt of all those calories; it's like discovering that mysterious, perfect flavour the foodie is always searching for but never finding. Sometimes, steeped in a hot bath surrounded by mounds of foam that smell like butterscotch or pumpkin spice, it's like drugs--the woozy, otherworldly feeling that comes over me signifying a chemical change in my brain, the air in the room heavy and humid as hashish.

There are scents that transport me in the absolute, time-travelling way that scents can: the mango-coconut-guava moisturizer from Hawaii that takes me back to the hotel room high above Waikiki where white doves flew in and out of the trees below our window. Then there are the products that take me places I have never been: the rough chunk of olive soap from the Middle East, hewn as hard as wood, that left a long scrape on my body when I first used it. And there are the colours of the bath bombs my boyfriend bought me, the fruit flavours lined up in a rainbow, perfectly reminiscent of the colours in a Family Circus comic strip--all lemons and blueberries and sweet tangerines--like a place of innocence from a lost time that, if I stared at them long enough, I could enter.

My boyfriend and I have a ritual now that I report every day what products I have used in the bath. Philou's Bubble Gum shampoo in my hair, I say. L'Occitane en Provence's bee-shaped honey-and-royal-jelly soap in the shower. Cake Beauty's Desserted Island body mousse afterward, a great slick of it on my open-pored skin, which soaks it up like a sponge cake. He laughs in bemusement but has begun himself to use a little Fruit Frappe Honeydew Melon body parfait on his hands, though he is still waiting for the day when some enterprising company will come out with moisturizers fragranced like pizza or beer.

The products keep flooding the market, ever more, convincing in their colorific fragrances, the bowl on my dining table filled not with real or plastic fruit but soaps that smell like fruit. Then there are those unique pieces, some of them whipped up in someone's kitchen, that can never be replaced: the bar of chocolate-layer-cake soap from San Francisco I was once given, complete with coconut flakes on top and chocolate chips inside; the handful of ginger-lime soap "candies", wrapped in cellophane, that filled my shower with a scent so paradisial I used them down to their last grains; the big bar of homemade almond-oatmeal-honey soap that left wet oak flakes in my tub and a sheen of sticky honey on my skin.

I have been known to give a particularly delectable bar of soap a tentative lick, to literally drool over the contents of a jar of product fragranced like marmalade or gingerbread. In the stores I see the glazed looks on women's faces as they open the tester jars and bottles, the ever-lurking appetite the smells seem to spark, as if all the foods they forbid themselves can finally be slathered instead on their faces and bodies. When I wave a new purchase under the nose of another woman, I see the way her eyes close in bliss as she takes a greedy sniff, inhaling the essences of marshmallow and vanilla and buttercream. Each of these bath treats promises a fulfillment that their edible counterparts cannot, a gluttony that can be satiated again and again every day, a private feast without an ounce of shame.