It’s a Wet Nap World

Before Christmas gets here, there is the smaller, more affectionate holiday of St. Nick’s Day — or the Feast of St. Nicholas, for the liturgically-minded. As a child, my family celebrated it by hanging socks or shoes by the fireplace, and in the morning small gifts like race cars, toy ponies, oranges and candy would appear.

For those looking for the perfect stocking stuffer for either holiday (especially for those with teens and pre-teens), might I suggest a Qwik Shower? Billed as “Gym Class Wipes… not just for gym class anymore,” the Qwik Shower is a perfect on-the-go solution for pungent pubescents.

Let me explain. Somehow, my email address was on the list of media contacts over at Qwik Shower HQ, and after a short online exchange my very own free samples were shipped to TCD’s office in Walker’s Point. With them came the back-story:

Harvey I. Metro is one half of Metro Metro & Associates out of Maryland. Harvey had stinky boys. Perhaps inspired by a modern world in which more and more products have become pre-moistened, he created a wetnap that’s like a small towel soaked with aloe, alcohol and a pleasant scent.

Many of us probably remember the bashfulness of getting in the showers in junior high or the consequences when others noticed our aroma if we skipped this step after exercise. Now there’s a solution sure to please everyone — as long as they’re willing to carry around giant pre-moistened towelettes.

And there’s clearly a market for this: just walk into any Costco or Walmart now, and it’s easy to find all sorts of variations on the original. But it’s not so much the product itself — what really spurred the pre-moistened wipe industry was the progressive design and technology of the containers, I’m convinced. I can’t tell if the marriage of paper goods and liquid product is actually greener for the environment, but it certainly feeds our need for convenience.

I’ll admit that I wasn’t the biggest fan of wet napkin offshoots at first. Yes, I appreciated the value of an anti-bacterial napkin and of the foil-wrapped eyeglass cleaning pad. I felt the immediate gratification of a Windex-infused wipe in its tall plastic container, and of course I acknowledge the usefulness baby wipes.

But it was only when I first spied the adult version of baby wipes—I believe the first ones were Cottonelle Wipes—that I became a convert. I discovered them at a friend’s when I was house-sitting. Like many, I “pshawed” what seemed like useless bits of moistened paper towel. We Americans didn’t fall for the French bidet, why would we need these? Don’t we have toilet paper for that kind of work?

Once I escaped my fear of regressing to infancy, I finally tried them. Damn. Now I can’t live without them — I even keep a travel version in my file cabinet at work.

So the new Qwik Shower is another variant to be sure, but I don’t think I’ll personally be using them beyond perhaps a gluttonous night at Famous Dave’s.

It may be an honorable device, made honestly by a dad that hasn’t sold out yet to Proctor, Gamble, Johnson, Johnson or even Clorox. Of course, it wasn’t until Arthur Julius met “Colonel” Harlan Sanders that the wetnap became an industry giant.

For now, you’ll have to order them online, either directly from the site or at Amazon.com — unless you live near Kang’s Black Belt Academy. Order now and have them in time to thrill your tween this Sunday as they find a popcorn ball and the means to avoid showering after gym in their shoe, right near the electric fireplace.