As you know from the first arti­cle, the choice for per­fumes and other toi­letries really wasn’t there. How­ever, the sit­u­a­tion began to change from the mid1970s. The imports from the coun­tries of the so-called social­ist camp were enter­ing the Soviet mar­ket. Every woman still remem­bers an excel­lent Pol­ish per­fume “May Be” – they were extremely pop­u­lar! There were also imports of some middle-of-the-road make up from Poland, but they were still very sought after and out­ra­geously expensive!

Of course, Moscow had the best choice of all other cities. This is why those who got to visit the cap­i­tal on busi­ness were con­sid­ered to be very lucky: unlike many other cities, Moscow actu­ally offered some shop­ping oppor­tu­ni­ties. More­over, there were shops with an assort­ment of goods from the above­men­tioned social­ist camp: Wanda, Vlasta, Leipzig, Yad­ran etc. Like, the “May Be” per­fume and colour­ful eye shad­ows (oh, those hor­rors of our past!) were sold at the Pol­ish Wanda. At the Ger­man Leipzig one could buy a face mois­turiser by “Ponds” and the hair dye “Lon­da­colour” of many hues. In com­par­i­son, the Soviet shops could only offer henna which gave a seri­ously bad gin­ger tone; or basma, which gave a rad­i­cal black. These two being the only options, Soviet women had no choice but to search for a per­fect pro­por­tion mix in order to get some­thing in between. Blondes, on the other hand, could only buy hydro­gen per­ox­ide from the chemist shops – the colour it pro­duced was also noth­ing to be proud of, a bright yel­low­ish white, but oh well, some like it hot.

The last bit of toi­letries worth men­tion­ing was soap. The choice for soap, as you can well imag­ine, was more than lim­ited. Before the War the soap fac­to­ries pro­duces two types of soap bars: gen­eral pur­pose (aka mar­ble for mar­ket­ing pur­poses, it was sold in huge chunks of over 800g) and another one, more del­i­cate, which had no name but it didn’t really mat­ter as it was impos­si­ble to buy any­way. How­ever, a tiny bar of it was included in the admis­sion price to the com­mu­nal bath­houses – appar­ently, there were some spe­cial chan­nels of dis­tri­b­u­tion for that one.

You must be think­ing – ah, who cares about the soaps! Let us explain – the only rea­son we are so hung up on it is because soap was the only toi­letry avail­able for bathing or show­er­ing. That’s right, they did not make shower gels, bub­ble baths, lus­cious body scrubs, wash-away body wraps, bath oils or any­thing of that kind. If you were a reg­u­lar Soviet with no access to the imported good­ies (and we would not be fright­ened to assume that it would com­prise to about of 95% of population) – then you’d grab a bar of soap and hope it’d last you a month or so, and this was the real­ity till maybe mid1980s.

After the war (much closer to the 1960s), the range of soap was slightly widened. A new brand (a real brand, with its promo shots in mag­a­zines) was intro­duced: Straw­berry (acidly pink in colour, with a strong reek of aro­ma­tiser); Pine (mar­keted as hand soap); Bathing (every­day soap, a cheaper one); the ever­p­re­sent gen­eral pur­pose which was also grated and then used instead of wash­ing pow­der; Kid­dies – for, obvi­ously, kids; and Tar  — allegedly for treat­ing dan­druff. Sim­ple names of sim­ple goods, really.

How­ever, those 5% we men­tioned ear­lier had access to the Ger­man soap – oh, that soap was divine! Not only it was pleas­antly oval, it had a soft scent, it did not dry out the skin and it pro­duced unbe­liev­able amounts of foam! The Soviet soap, com­pared to it, was only good as a moth proofer, due to its strong stench.

Later on, closer to the end of 1980s, kids were also tar­geted: a gift set “Squeaky Clean” (Moidodyr) inclided a kids tooth­brush, sweetly flavoured tooth pow­der, a bar of soap and a tiny bot­tle of per­fume in an attrac­tive card­board box.

By the way, right through till 1970s, the only den­tal hygiene prod­uct avail­able was the tooth pow­der. Then, of course, the tooth­pastes “Mint” and “Pearl” became wide­spread. The imported pastes – like Pomorin from Bul­garia – would have always won, hands down.

Over­all, the term “spoilt for choice” did not exist for a very long time in the USSR. When you have to choose between three very sim­i­lar and equally low qual­ity items – life mustn’t be wouldn’t be too com­pli­cated then, would it?

Related posts:

1. Soviet Brands: The Scent Of Com­mu­nism. Part 1 of 2
2. Fun­time with Soviet Playthings
3. Sexy Soviet Under­wear. Not!
4. Sign­boards of Soviet Stores
5. A Glance at the Soviet Lifestyle, Cap­tured by Marc Riboud.