I can't pass by bath products in Japan
Whenever I'm in Japan, I can't just walk past a bath soak display. So many products are hard to find back home, and the packaging is fun too — I pick up whatever catches my eye, and before I know it, one whole side of my suitcase is bath soaks.
But since I started making bath soaks myself, the reason I buy them in Japan has changed a lot.
It's harder to just pass by now
I used to pick things based purely on the package. Now I look at a single bath soak much more closely — why my eye went to this one out of hundreds, what phrase on the box created the urge to buy, how the price and volume were put together.
Something that started out of love turned into a job, so even on vacation, it seems I can't fully go back to being just a consumer.
What's fun about Japanese bath soaks
The thing I find most interesting, every single time, is that each product has a clear moment you're meant to use it: a tired day, a day your body feels cold, right before sleep, a day you want to feel like you're at an onsen. Instead of a difficult, grand explanation, it shows you exactly the feeling you're after — easily, intuitively.
Just from the package, you can already picture what it'll smell like, what mood it's going for. That part is fun too.
Something more important than buying
Of course, it doesn't end with buying a pile of them. I use each one, check what the scent was actually like, what color the water turned, how close the feeling I expected from the packaging was to the real experience. Whether I'd want to buy it again, what was good, what fell short — and somewhere in there, I end up reconsidering the direction I want for our own soaks.
So bathing time isn't purely rest time for me anymore. Even using someone else's bath soak, I'm unconsciously still analyzing — smelling the scent, watching the water color, checking the texture. My head stays busy. A bath-soak maker's half-bath, huh.
In the end, I think about our own product again
The more of other brands' products I see, the less I want to make something vaguely similar to any of them — and the clearer MOKUTANG's own color becomes instead.
If Japanese bath soaks show off the many small moments of everyday bathing, I want to make soaks built around Korean ingredients. Rather than a product used once and forgotten, I want to make one where the memory of that particular day stays with you.
Next trip to Japan, my suitcase will probably fill up with bath soaks all over again. Buying because I like it, using it myself, then rethinking what I want to make — this has become its own kind of travel for a bath-soak maker.
