What's Up, Scotland? Deodorant and Tissues

Despite my mother's suggestion to write about crisps (or, potato chips), a trip to the pharmacy and an order from Tesco so shocked my American sensibilities that I feel obligated to do a post on, yes, deodorant and tissues.

Preparing for a flight to London a few months back, I found myself in the pharmacy looking for a travel size deodorant.  This raised several problems, not least of which was I know (thank you, continual TSA education) that you're not allowed to travel with liquids in containers of more than 4 ounces, but (not surprisingly) none of the containers in the UK were labeled in ounces, only milliliters. And I have no idea how to convert ounces to milliliters.  Besides this milliliters to ounces problem, I was struck by the fact that all the deodorants seemed to be competing to be awarded the title "longest lasting."  Now, if your target audience is teenage boys, it might be seen as an advantage to only have to re-apply your deodorant every 72 hours. But personally, I am wary of products that boast 48 or 72 hours of effectiveness. It seems like you should apply deodorant at least once per day to achieve acceptable hygiene.  But maybe that's my American sensibilities talking.  When Paul ran out of deodorant, I looked for a "short acting" formulation - something you might apply once a day, but the best I could find in our local Boots was the 48-hour version:

Dove Men+Care Antiperspirant deodorant

 My other concern has been with tissues.  In the US, tissues do vary.  You can get ones with aloe in them, or you can get them in rectangular boxes or small cubes. You can perhaps even get an "extra-strong" variety. But here in Scotland they have a kind of tissues I've never seen in the US. they are called "Man-Sized" tissues. Now, my background is in biological anthropology, and studying sexual dimorphism in modern humans will tell you men are indeed a bit bigger than women.  Probably if you take the time to measure, you will find that men have slightly larger noses, on average, than women.  But these man-sized tissues are ridiculous.  They are about 1/3 wider and 1/4 longer than normal sized tissues, or, to put in in perspective, about the size of my 2 1/2 year old's head. When I ordered them from Tesco (note: we do online shopping and delivery from the big Tesco in town: super convenient, except you can't really gauge the size of things you are buying when everything is in grams and you're not used to measuring that way - I accidentally bought really tiny amounts of cheese and a personal-size pizza when trying to buy larger quantities.) I thought at least the man-sized tissues might be more robust. But no.  Just inanely bigger.  My main feeling when I am using a man-sized tissue is "Man, a lot of this tissue is going to waste here." Thank you for attending to my rant. Back to other topics soon.  

Man-sized tissues, with regular sized ones for comparison