Whenever stumped for something to write about, I take a walk around the house. You’d think it would be easy to find something with all this stuff, but sometimes there’s just not a lot I can say about what I’ve got — or at least nothing that makes me look good…

Soaps and Elves

For example, tonight I paused at one shelf and had to ask myself, “Just what are those soaps doing there?”

It’s a legitimate question.

I can’t call it an unintentional or accidental collection. There’s too many of the soaps, for one thing.

It started with the ah, err, creepy soap people (the evil twins and their maniacal brother) who came in a box with something else. I can’t recall what right now — but it (or they) must have been really cool to make me do so because those soap people creep me out big time. Seriously. I find them so frightening, I have to put them near my army of happy vintage Christmas elves — hoping their warm-fuzzy-family-memory goodness will erase the bad soap kid juju.

But once I had those three sinister sibling soaps, I must have admitted I had a thing for soap figurines (can you call them figurines if they are made of soap?), because I remember getting the two farm animal soaps at a rummage sale. And when I brought them home I put them by the soap trio of terror. Ditto the figural polar bear soap. They were no accident, so I can’t claim ignorance to my stock-piling of non-usable soaps.

Little Lulu Soap

In fact, I remember grabbing with glee the Little Lulu soap — as if my purchase was some huge victory over the other people at the sale. No, I do not collect Little Lulu items.

I am sighing and rolling my eyes at myself.

I don’t even pretend to know if soaps like this have any value. Outside of a few political soaps, or soaps as part of an advertising collection (which, when you get right down to it, is the same thing as political soaps), I’ve never heard of the buying and selling of collectible soap. Sure, I can see how soaps might cross-over into other collecting categories — like Little Lulu soap appealing to collectors of the comic. But collecting soap? I’ve never heard of “soap collectors”.

Thinking of all this, I told myself I couldn’t write a column about something I knew nothing about. “Hey, wait a minute”, my pride said, “You do know something about collecting.” No matter what the category, there are several standard collecting rules.

Like an object’s age (an implied rarity) and its actual scarcity. But soaps, at least mine, have no marks for maker, no dates, no nothing to help me track down identity. I thought, “Like maybe they smell it or something to assess age, materials, or whatever…” That only made me giggle.

OK, so condition is always an issue — I told myself to look at that. Yeah, they have some wear… But how bad is it? Just how good should old soap look? Would ‘unused’ be good enough? How about ‘recognizable’? I started to think that maybe soap collectors would have some clear guidelines…

I turned to Google and searched.

Retro Avon Male Chauvinist Pig Soap And Box

I didn’t find any collector sites for soap — but I did quickly find this retro Male Chauvinist Pig Soap by Avon.

And guess what? I want it. Bad. (Santa, are you listening?)

So I had to stop looking. For while I know nothing about the monetary value of old soaps, I do know that I have a weakness for soap figurines — especially the soap people. Which means that it’s too easy to increase whatever collectible soap equity I do have.

And like any collector who is more enthusiastic than educated, I’ll probably spend too much.

So if you know of any soap collectors, please send them my way.

---

================

Gotta Collect? Then You Gotta Connect - Join our Collectors’ Community!

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 7th, 2008 at 7:01 am and is filed under flea market finds. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.