For $32, Clay Treatment Bar will get you in a lather
by Beth Teitell

Wednesday, April 25, 2001

What drives a person to spend $32 on a bar of soap? Excuse me, I misspoke. Not on soap, on a ``treatment bar.''

I wish I could say, ``Who knows what's wrong with some people?''

But once you've made a special trip to Back Bay on a Saturday, circled for 20 minutes looking for a parking spot (while singing/yelling ``The Itsy Bitsy Spider'' to ward off any crying from the baby in the rear-facing car seat), and plunked down $32 for an Umbrian Clay Treatment Bar at fresh, a Newbury Street skin care boutique, you really can't pass judgement.

Let's just say I have my reasons.

My story began innocently, as these things always do. A friend got the bar as a freebie, and asked if I'd like it.

I must admit that I'd never craved Umbrian Clay, never even heard of it, but once I learned how much the bar cost, I could think of nothing I wanted more.

By the time a woman gets to a certain age she's accepted a few things about herself: the length of her legs, the size of her bust, the shape of her nose (rhinoplasty is a sweet 16 procedure, after that, you keep what you've got).

But the skin, though it gets worse by the day, allows her to dream. If she just had the right cream, she thinks, she'd look like Uma, or Isabella.

This bar, with its pore-tightening, cell-regenerating, oiliness-reducing properties, was going to be my ticket out.

Like a $200 bottle of wine, I imagined the bar was best enjoyed if one was educated enough to appreciate its subtleties. I didn't want to become a clay snob, but I thought some knowledge might be nice. At www.fresh.com, I learned that the special ingredient in the bar comes from the small Italian town of Nocera Umbra, where naturally occurring white clay - argilla bianca - has been the basis of numerous therapeutic treatments since the Etruscans first began using it in the sixth century B.C.

I thought back to all the Etruscan sculpture I'd seen, but I couldn't remember how the women's skin looked. I called a friend who's knowledgeable about such matters, but she was no help.

``The Etruscans,'' she said, ``weren't they the ones who studied the intestines of animals to learn the future?''

Wanting to be alone with my bar all of a sudden, I got off the phone and admired its cool gray cardboard box and its graceful lines.

I wanted to use it, but I was scared. Thirty two dollars. I decided to display it for a while in my bathroom, but after a few weeks of very low traffic (my husband and I), I decided it wasn't living up to its potential. As its curator, I wasn't doing it justice.

I unwrapped the bar and took it into the shower with me. But where to put it? The soap coaster mounted in the shower wall gets a little spray. I didn't want my $32 to go down the drain.

``Be careful when you shower,'' I told my husband later. ``Try to keep the water off my new bar. Or maybe don't shower at all. Would you mind taking a bath?''

I wet my face as instructed and rubbed the bar over my skin. The impurities washed away. It was like I was getting a facial, and for how much? A dime? Twenty cents? Sure, the bar was pricey, but not, I reminded myself and others, on a per-use basis.

Which brings me almost to last Saturday. My best friend's birthday was approaching, and I thought she'd like her own Umbrian Clay Treatment Bar.

As hard-core dieters in high school, we used to joke that if one of us gave the other a box of chocolates that would signal the friendship was over. What kind of message would a lump of clay send? Would it be a latter-day Godiva?

``There's something I want to get you,'' I said, ``but it looks really cheap.''

When I told her about the clay and how wonderful I looked (well, not wonderful wonderful, but my skin looks better, at least to me, well, let's just say it feels better) she said she wanted it.

Which, dear reader, was why I shlepped to Newbury Street last weekend to spend a week's worth of grocery money on a bar of mud.