Taking a shower is, usually, a relaxing experience. It’s a chance to slough off all your troubles, switch off your brain, wash that man patriarchal rubbish right out of your hair, and inhale all of those uplifting shower gel scents.
For one woman, however, it was a very different experience. And it had a lot to do with the minty freshness of her chosen shower product.
The woman, who runs the Facebook page and blog ‘I Know, I Need To Stop Talking’ (IKINTST), shared an open letter to the shower gel’s maker Original Source, telling them about her run-in with their body wash at 6.45am on Wednesday morning.
“Um, Original Source… can we talk?” she begins.
What follows next is an almost perfect setting of the scene. “I'd like to take you back to around 6.45am this morning, when I stepped into my bath,” she writes, explaining that she decided to crack open a brand-new bottle of Mint and Tea Tree Shower Gel and “work it into a lather”.
“I applied it to first one leg, then the other, and shaved them diligently,” she says. “I washed my arms and shaved underneath them. I washed my neck, breasts, stomach and back.
“Thus far, it had been a positively first class bathing experience.”
But then… well, but then something unexpected happened.
“My vagina was ablaze,” she writes.
“For a moment, I wasn't entirely sure what had happened. Had I repeated the never to be forgotten error when I managed to apply hair removal cream which was strictly not for front bottoms to my front bottom?
"BECAUSE IT F**KING FELT LIKE IT.”
(The capital letters are all her own, of course)
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What follows is a side-splittingly hilarious tale of woe, as IKINTST recounts the intensity of the sensations she experienced, and her fears that a “stray spark had inadvertently set light to my pubic thatch”.
“Yes, Original Source, your innocuous looking green bottle of so called shower gel, it turns out, is an absolute f**king liability,” she writes. “I had a quick look at the ingredients list to see if it contained gasoline. It did not.
“There was a warning though. ‘KEEP AWAY FROM EYES.’ Keep away from eyes? KEEP AWAY FROM EYES? Frankly, my eyes were the least of my problems right now.”
Keep away from eyes? KEEP AWAY FROM EYES? Frankly, my eyes were the least of my problems right now
She continues: “I frantically scrubbed my flaps, which by now felt as though they were being ceremoniously scrubbed by ants wearing ice skates laced with chilli sauce. ‘7,929 tingling leaves’ claimed the front of the bottle.
“Tingling? TINGLING? This wasn’t tingling my minge. It was starting a f**king bush fire down there.”
The burning did not fade away quickly: in fact, it took IKINTST around 12 hours for her nether regions to start feeling halfway normal again. And, as a result, she has a request for Original Source: please put a warning on the front of your shower gel bottles. Ideally in huge black letters.
“May I suggest a rebranding of the front of your bottles of Mint and Tea Tree Shower Gel? Something along the lines of the following: ‘7,927 tingling leaves which will accost your genitalia until it screams for mercy.’
“If nothing else, it will certainly stand out on the shelf.”
The post has since been shared 120,972 times on Facebook – and the numbers are steadily racking up as you read this.
We’ve taken a quick scroll through the comments – and, as it turns out, IKINTST is not the first to have been burned by Original Source – and we doubt she will be the last.
“I feel your pain, yeah literally,” wrote one. “I was unfortunate enough to be drawn in by this great looking shower gel until I was singing ‘and it burns burns burns, the ring of fire’. Not something I am wanting to repeat ever again.”
Another added: “When I started reading this I knew exactly what you were going to say. It smells lovely but the same thing happened to me when I used it last week…
“Hope your minty fresh bits are back to normal!
And, proving it happens to men as well as women, one guy wrote: “Ahh, I see you too have walked through the burning door of pain. You have my sympathy.”
Original Source have yet to respond to the post (although it’s worth noting that they haven’t exactly brushed the tingling effects of their product under the carpet).
Images: Facebook/Twitter/GIPHY
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