Better Homes And Gardens Coastal Sand Resin Soap Dish

Circle, Label, Bottle cap, Household supply, Rubber stamp,

Photograph by Christopher Coppola/Studio D

I would like to begin with the revelation that I am not, and have never been, a hotel soap thief. I do not fill my toiletries case with tiny bottles of body cream, mementos of my occasional five-star experiences. I make a point, too, of staying away from the mini shampoos arrayed so alluringly on the marble sides of soaking tubs, and I do not bring them back as stocking stuffers for my children. I am not that person. But maybe you are?

If so, you're in good company. Almost everyone else I know, including many incredibly talented and successful people, are right there with you. And it is also true that I myself can't really resist a little sewing kit, or mini manicure sets, rare as they are, which seem to call out on a frequency only I can hear: Stick me in your purse. Plus, I admit, I have a little something for those bedside pens and, of course, the little chocolates they put on your pillow at night — though those don't tend to actually make it back home. They don't tend to make it to the next morning. But I digress.

What weird contemporary psychosis is this that we all, to varying extents, share? How come, when faced with freebie products in sizes that (and this is key) wouldn't spark a second look if they weren't free, we suddenly turn into junkies, greedy for our fix? What's the story behind this addiction, and what's the reason no one has invented a 12-step process to cure it — or a reality TV show to expose it? Does opportunity not knock?

Apparently not. After all, if we all suffer from some variant of this affliction (for the purposes of this story, let it be known as HSS: hotel soap syndrome), and my guess is we do, then what's the fun of exposing it? More interesting, perhaps, to try to understand it.

So here's what I think. This isn't, at root, about fear of being without. Both my grandfathers grew up during the Depression, and though they both came through it just fine — one became a lawyer, the other ran a canned food business — when they died and my parents went to clean out their homes, they found piles of stuff: paper clips, rubber bands, soup, canned corn, and so on — the classic consumer tell of those scarred by scarcity.

HSS isn't that, because it's not prompted by fear, although in some ways I think it is related to it, in the sense that it has to do with money.

After all, think about where HSS occurs. It's not at a Days Inn (convenient as they are when dropping a child off at summer camp). It's not at a Best Western. It is, perhaps, at the Principe in Milan, stocked with Acqua di Parma, or the Bulgari, replete with, well, Bulgari. It is at the Four Seasons, with L'Occitane in the bathroom. It is at the Carlyle with Kiehl's or the Mandarin Oriental Tokyo with Aromatherapy Associates. It is, in other words, at pretty much any luxury hotel, where costs are high and brands equally upmarket.

There are a few reasons for this. First, sometimes it's the mere access to a great product that might otherwise be hard to get, that might require traveling outside your normal geography, that prompts the urge to hoard. Suddenly — bing! — there it is, in your (temporary) bathroom, and, well, if you don't take a lot of it while it's readily available, you might be missing a trick — you might be being played for a sucker. This is the toiletry equivalent of being taken out for a great meal when you are, for example, on a kibbutz, or at boarding school. Every part of you shrieks, "Stuff yourself! The chance may not come again!" (This I know. I and my stomach have been there.)

Second, there's the cost/benefit equation. High-end hotels are expensive, and on some level there's an "I deserve it" edge to HSS, a sense that you are a smart person, and you know you are paying through the nose to be cosseted when you could easily survive on fewer overstuffed cushions, but hey, you're getting something out of it too, and not just a fragrant place to lay your head. You're getting soap! A lot of soap! And, finally, there's that sheer remove from reality that often takes place in a five-star hotel, where, because you are so taken care of, because you don't have to really do anything for yourself (other than dial room service), you lose sight of normal behavior and start to think it's rational — intelligent, even — to want to take as much of that experience away with you as you can. And there's no doubt: Toiletries are the portable answer.

They are a madeleine for the groomed set; a sensory magic carpet to a time out of time. And since they're sized for only a weekend's worth of body washing — well, you need a lot of them. Proust would understand.

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