£1.80
All good supermarkets

Original Source shower gel is the reason why I started this website many years ago and I still struggle with the memories of that experience to this day. So when I entered the bathroom with the idea of taking a normal shower, you can imagine the crashing look I had on my face when my eyes landed upon this pink bottle of mystery.

I tentatively picked up the bottle and studied the text on the front. The title read Sweet Apple and Vanilla Milk, which is ‘shower milk’. I have a few issues with this already;

Things you can milk – mammals, injuries, illnesses.

Things you can’t milk – apples (sweet or otherwise), vanilla, showers.

I’m not saying I’m a professional on the subject of what you can and can’t milk, but I don’t think I’m too ill-informed when it comes to the act of milking something*.

*I’ve never tried to milk a shower, and apple (sweet or otherwise), nor vanilla, so apologies if this can be done.

Underneath the brand name, the text says ‘100% natural fragrance’. I’m not sure at what percentage the bevy of chemicals listed in the ingredients is deemed as ‘100% natural fragrance’, but surely mixing synthetic chemicals to create a damp, shitting pig smell is still natural, because it naturally happened when mixing said chemicals.

 

After learning that this ‘shower milk’ is suitable for Vegans (yum, spread that shit on an avocado), I read the ingredients, expecting to see familiar and wholesome words like ‘bread’ or whatever Vegans eat. Instead, I was stood there with my eyes frantically scanning each word as if I were trying to decipher a long-forgotten, ancient text that would stop an impending meteor strike.

Ingredients

 

I applied a generous amount of this DNA-changing cocktail of hazardous materials onto my hand and applied onto my body in a normal fashion. After a while of trying to get this shitty pink mucus to do something other than just slide right off and escape down the drain, I finally managed to lather some onto my arms by slapping it onto the skin, lightly damaging myself. I couldn’t enjoy the ‘100% natural fragrance’ because it dissipated the second it left the bottle, still, fuelled on by the thought of mutating into a superhero thus meaning I wouldn’t have to get a normal job, I rinsed the slimy, scentless, pointless, product from my arms and dried off.

On a scale of 1-10, the moisturizing aspect of this product falls somewhere in the minus 40 area. I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt though as gently grazing the skin and then warp-boosting to the floor of the shower only gives it a few nanoseconds of contact time between the two. It’s only a micro-step up from opening the bottle and pouring it down the sink, and the 100% natural fragrance that they felt the need to indicate was like a dying memory enveloped by misremembered retellings to a room full of people you need to impress for that promotion – did it really happen? Was it really ever truly there?

All in all, using this stuff was a whole life’s worth of pain easier than the first Original Source I tried, yet I still left the experience with a dull ache of un-moisturized and fragrant-free sadness.