One of the weirder areas of nostalgia for me lies within the realm of the not-so-exciting household products that either my mom would buy or that I’d see while grocery shopping with her as a kid. Sometimes I get the same sort of longing pangs for a Fresh’n Up room deodorizer (the kind that came in a rectangular cylinder where you’d lift the outer casing to expose the room-freshening power contained within) that I do for some of my long lost G.I. Joe and Transformers toys. That’s one of the beautiful things about flipping through 30 year-old issues of Woman’s Day and McCalls, getting a chance to see some of these mundane extinct products that I never in a million years would have guessed had such an impact on my youthful self.
In the category of obscure and unfortunate household style degradation comes today’s advertisement for the line of colored Cottonelle toilet paper, circa 1982…
Seriously, in this age of ever increasing and exciting technologies, why is it so apparent that the toilet paper industry is practically falling apart at the perforated seams? When the key advancements surround thickening the sheets to an extent where we’re practically rubbing our nether-regions with small pillows, and the best the industry’s advertising has to offer aesthetically speaking is a bunch of multicolored bears with dingle-berry issues, we know we’re in trouble. What happened to the days when companies were so secure in the age-old technology that they began to shift their focus to enhancing the color scheme of the paper to make for a better looking lavatorial environment? Long story short, where are my mint green rolls of toilet paper? Why has this advancement been stripped from store shelves?
At the end of the day I just want a toilet paper option that’ll really (design-wise) tie the room together. Is that so much to ask? In the immortal words of Weird Al, “You better squeeze all the Charmin you can…”, because one day Mr. Whipple and Charmin might not be around…
