The Great Shower Gel Conspiracy

The great shower gel conspiracy : It's expensive, packed full of chemicals, wasteful... and no better than soap.

· Eight out of ten people wash themselves with gels costing up to £4 a bottle

· Tesco has 94 gel brands on sale, each with its own name, ingredients and unique smell.

Gels first appeared in British bathrooms in the Seventies. Today some 200million bottles are sold in Britain alone every year.Whoever invented shower gel must lie awake at night - no doubt in a gold-plated, four-poster bed - chuckling at the audacity of it all.

Here is a product that is expensive, packed full of man-made chemicals, difficult to use and wasteful. And yet, thanks to the persuasive power of marketing, bottles of it sit proudly in almost every bathroom in the land. Once, we used to clean ourselves with bars of long-lasting soap that cost the equivalent of a few pence a week. Today, more than eight out of ten people wash themselves with gels costing up to £4 a bottle.

Not that shower gel manufacturers admit they are involved in the business of washing, of course. Instead, they sell their wares as revitalising foams, honey shower milks and rebalancing body experiences.Imperial Leather’s Japanese Spa Foam Burst is, it claims, designed to help you wake up in the morning. Palmolive’s Absolute Relax is supposed to send you to sleep. You will struggle to find a shower gel that admits what it is really intended for: as a way of removing dirt, sweat and grease.

Long gone are the days of explicit adverts for Lifebuoy - the soap that said ‘No to BO’, (body odour). But as Britain has gone crazy for shower gel bottle, with an estimated 200 million bottles sold in the UK each year, there are small signs of artisan soap rebellion.

While the secrets of soap-making can be traced back to at least the Ancient Babylonians in 2800 BC, when animal fat was mixed with the ashes of wood fires and melted, the first liquid soap was actually patented in 1865 by a chap called William Shepphard. His patent claims “Improved Liquid Soap,” so it seems clear there was liquid soap around already.

It is estimates that millions of gallons of gel are washed away, (down the drain and into the water course), unused every year for one reason or another. Despite this Britain’s love affair with shower gel is still going strong. Tesco, at last count, had 94 brands on sale, each with its own name, ingredients, unique smell and supposed job. Most sane people would struggle to come up with 94 different conventional fragrances for toiletries. But the clever people at Unilever and Cussons have got around that by persuading consumers that what they really want to smell like is food: thus, we can wash ourselves with Chocolate and Mint shower gel, Milk and Honey shower creme, or Cranberry and Honey shower scrubs.

Evidently, gels have come a long way since PZ Cussons, the makers of Imperial Leather - for a long time regarded as the traditional hard soap for middle-class families - introduced its first ‘Luxury Shower Gel’ in 1978. Gels were, in part, a response to a change in bathroom habits that saw showers growing in popularity as our lives became busier and we all became more aware of the need to use water sparingly. But the rise of shower gels can’t be explained simply by the move from the twice-weekly bath to the daily shower. After all, showers had already become a staple of homes by the Seventies, and for at least a decade after that, most people were happy with soap - or occasionally if one were feeling more exotic then ‘soap on a rope’ may have been purchased.

The secret of their success lies in the fact that while they are cheap to manufacture, they are easy to brand as a luxury. By selling them as modern, convenient and indulgent, cosmetic companies cleaned up. Modern gels are more complicated to make however. But their basic ingredient, a detergent that sticks to grease and water, is similar to the detergent in hard soap bars. 'Most of the differences between brands are trivial in terms of what they do functionally - removing dirt and grease. But the real difference - and this is the genius of marketing - is how those small differences, like the fragrance and the associations that come with that fragrance, can be used to create something more than the product 'In order to remain thick, perfumed and coloured, a typical shower gel will contain around 20 chemicals, some man-made, others derived from plants. It will have a couple of plant-based detergents, an array of perfumes, salt to thicken it, glycerine - a clear, sticky liquid used in cough mixtures and icing on cakes - to make the gel silky, film-forming agents, lactic acid (found in sour milk to counteract the alkali and make it pH- neutral), preservatives, agents that reduce static in human hair and natural plant extracts.

Most of these plant extracts have very little practical purpose and are just for marketing purposes so that the gels can have fancy names or to push eco credentials. Marketing is what it is all about. From the earliest days of industrially produced soap, manufacturers realised that to sell more soap, they needed to persuade Britons to become more ‘hygienic’, the more people washed, the bigger the profits. So, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that some of the earliest and most successful advertising campaigns were for soaps.

The English company Lever Brothers created Lifebuoy in 1895 and sold it as an antiseptic soap. The company also invented the term BO, (body odour). Pears devised a sophisticated transparent soap and launched a yearly search for Miss Pears. Yet no marketing campaign for soap would be strong enough to fend off the advance of shower gels.

Those who prefer gels say they are happy to put up with the extra expense for the sake of convenience: unlike soap, they don’t leave scum or mess around the shower, and a small amount goes a long way. But for many, they are a victory of marketing over common sense.

One of the UK’s top marketing gurus, who has worked with many gel manufacturers, said: ‘Most of the differences between brands are trivial in terms of what they do functionally - removing dirt and grease. But the real difference - and this is the genius of marketing - is how those small differences, like the fragrance and the associations that come with that fragrance, can be used to create something more than the product. That value to the brand is real. If a product has associations of being refreshing in the morning or relaxing in the evening, it can be a genuine bonus for the consumer, it might help people feel relaxed or refreshed. Some of that association is intrinsic in the ingredients of gel, but much of it is created through advertising.

So, are we being taken for a ride by the gel marketing types? The answer is probably yes. But then, how many of us would really want to go back to using half a bar of soap in the shower when we could be reaching for a bottle of that oh-so fragrant Balinese Spa Foam Burst?