Happy thursday everyone. Today I’d like to share with you a somewhat novelty inedible item I found.
Original Source’s Extreme Wake Up shower gel, with extracts of lemon and chilli. But no, not those practically deadly capsaicin concentrates, just unconcentrated extract of habanero heat and flavour. And not even a lot of those.
For all the dramatic black and red branding we see against the orangey-yellow liquid that its transparent container gives us a glimpse of, this product is actually pretty mild.
It seems to have no qualms about bigging up its chilli content, though, what with these warning colours, the word “extreme” and even artwork that uses chillies as the exhaust flames of a lemon rocket silhouette. It’s clearly intended to sell on some kind of appeal to manliness.
Which seems silly to me because it’s actually pretty gentle. No more potent than the more widely known mint gels out there and more of a warming tingle than any real burn.
I’ve heard a lot of people worried about how badly it might sting the eyes or other sensitive body parts but I speak from experience when I say that it’s actually no worse than any regular shampoo or shower gel. The only place I really don’t want to have it again is in my mouth.
Because yes, I did taste test it for you. And yes, it was as gross as expected.
Just lemon flavoured soap, really, with almost nothing coming through from the chilli besides a low
1.5/10
Heat
that is, if anything, a little higher than I’d expected from its mild, low one out of ten feel on my skin.
But, while that lemon taste does translate to its smell, what this shower gel does in my mouth is largely irrelevant. It’s for cleaning skin, not being eaten.
And, if I’m utterly honest, I’m not that impressed with its scent. It’s not bad but it’s just lemon when it could be so much more.
Like the company’s earlier chilli and black pepper, for example. That one actually had a unique chilli fragrance that enjoyed but here the chilli is just a gentle heat.
And yet the chilli is quite recognisably a habanero, its “prickly” heat translating to a tingliness rather than the general glow you’d get from such small doses of most other peppers.
It is, of course, this that makes the product worth talking about. The bloodflow that this warmth causes makes it surprisingly good at soothing aching muscles after a physically exhausting day, be that at the gym, playing sports or, in my case, carrying 60 litres of compost back from the garden centre when you don’t have taxi fare.
It’s an awful lot better than the usual lavender muscle soaks, which do more to calm your mood, if anything, than actually ease any aches or pains.
So, all in all, it’s a rather silly, gimmicky product but one that, when it goes cheap, I do like to stock up on a lot of.
Spicefreak 