How My Dove Shower Tool Turned Me Into a Real (Clean) Man

Dove Men+Care asked our writer to try out some new products. They had no idea how much he needed them.

I have a rent-controlled one-bedroom apartment in Chinatown—the sort of charmingly tiny, old crooked apartment where you know something in it is going to be completely bizarre. Like there are no cabinets at all, and there’s a shower in the middle of the living space.

Here’s my shower:

And here it is next to the couch:

Which is also next to the stove:

With living quarters like these, it’s obvious that I’m not the type of guy who regularly uses special hygiene products. In fact, I’d run out of soap at home some time ago and had just been showering with shampoo.

And then a happy surprise: Dove offered to send me some top-line Men’s Care products to try out. Had my mom tipped them off? Had my neighbors begun to smell me and called some sort of Dove emergency hotline?

At first, I was happy just to have soap, let alone Dove Men+Care Sensitive Clean Body and Face Wash with MICRO MOISTURE. But the good people at Dove had sent more than soap. They’d also included a Dual-Sided Active Clean Shower Tool. I might not be the kind of guy who uses a sponge very often, but this was a tool—it said so right there on the package. A “tool” I could do.

I had my Body Wash and Shower Tool. I was ready to do this:

I stepped in, poured the shower gel on the Shower Tool, and scrubbed hard. At first it hurt a little, but in a good way—like when you get a really good back scratch. It really did seem like a tool, like I was getting real work done. I almost felt like I should be wearing protective goggles. (Note to Dove: I want a cut if you start selling the goggles.)

The Shower Tool’s two sides—one wider sweeping, one deeper scrubbing—felt like the cleansing scrub-down you get at Turkish baths in Istanbul, where large sumo-shaped men give massages with rough, exfoliating gloves to unsuspecting tourists. And luckily, no one dragged me naked across the floor while dumping buckets of water on me this time.

I might have gone a bit overboard with the scrubbing, so I expected for my skin to dry out when I stepped back into my kitchen. I didn’t. I have no idea what MICRO MOISTURE means—and I’m not sure I want to know. But my skin felt good. Here’s me feeling fantastically clean:

By the way, this article took a long time to write because I keep massaging my fantastically smooth arms. Is that weird? Check back in a week when I try out some other Dove products in the weird-smelling locker room of my gym…It’d probably be weird to take pictures in there, right?