I’ve recently come to a startling conclusion—I am the Kiss of Death.
Luckily for those around me, this doesn’t mean that by touching me they’ll drop dead.
Or I can give a look that will make people spontaneously combust in their tracks (although that would be pretty cool, wouldn’t it?). Or that parents shield their screaming children from me on the street.
It simply means that anytime I fall in love with a particular product, the manufacturers discontinue it.
The pink shimmery nail polish I used all the time? Gone. The lipstick I loved so much I kept one in my purse and one with my makeup at home? That’s gone too. The eyeliner that I believed perfectly complimented my eyes? Yanked from the shelves never to be seen again.
This mysterious disappearance of products has been happening to me since adolescence—the time when products begin to rule your life. So now that I’m an adult, I shouldn’t be surprised.
Yet I am. Both shocked and dismayed, every single time something I use gets sucked into a black hole.
The most recent shakeup in my product life addressed something I thought was sacred—my shampoo. I had used the same scented shampoo since college. So after sticking with something—and in kind, having it stick with me—for decades, I thought our relationship was safe.
Boy was I ever wrong.
I remember going to the store and heading to the shampoo aisle to get a couple bottles of the elixir that had kept my hair shiny and bouncy, rather than oily and flat, for ages.
That’s when I saw the first sign—some of the bottles were in new packaging, and the shampoo was said to be “New and Improved.”
This is the first step of the nightmare. When I was a kid, the detergent my mom used became “New and Improved.” What we soon discovered was that she and I were evidently allergic to improvements of any kind, as we broke out in hives which caused my mom not only to get calamine lotion by the barrel, but also to go buy another detergent and then proceed to rewash every piece of clothing we owned.
But I digress…
I was going to give the new version of my shampoo a try. Until, that is, I smelled it.
My shampoo, which had smelled like fragrant strawberry fields on warm spring days, now stank like the overly sweet icky strawberry candies that we used to eat as kids.
I knew that I simply couldn’t bear to shampoo with something that smelled so much like strawberry scented sugar.
The one product that had stayed with me through finals, graduation, my first job, breakups, and moves was heading out of my life, and I wasn’t going down without a fight.
I spent time buying up every bottle I could get my grubby little hands on. My husband thought I had lost my mind.
While staring at the many bottles in our linen closet, he decided that this was one of those things that you don’t question in a marriage. Sometimes it’s better to let your spouses have their breakdowns. He just didn’t get it.
Until one day his favorite deodorant went the way of the dodo.
“Blech, this new one stinks,” he exclaimed one fine day.
“Would you like to see if we can find any of your old kind at the store?” I asked. He reluctantly agreed.
Ahhh…there’s nothing like the loss of a product to make one a quick convert.
Michele “Wojo” Wojciechowski, when she’s not being paranoid that she’ll wake up one morning only to find that every product she uses from deodorant to dishwashing liquid has been replaced, writes Wojo’s World® from Baltimore. She’s also the author of the award-winning humor book Next Time I Move, They’ll Carry Me Out in a Box. You can connect with Wojo on Facebook or on Twitter.
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