Spice Up Your Bath

Visit this culinary bath and skin care shop for delicious treats that you can't quite eat.

I want to devour the Pineapple Yippee. It looks and smells like pure temptation, glistening like a scoop of custard garnished with a curl of pineapple and served in a little deli cup. But it's not dessert, I remind myself. It's a facial scrub.

I've had dieting hallucinations before, but this isn't one of them. I'm in Bathos, a little shop in Franklin, Tennessee, where batches of soaps, scrubs, and masks are cooked up using ingredients that you'd normally find in a kitchen. The results look and smell good enough to tempt your taste buds. I'm not the first to mistake them for appetizers.

Good Enough To Eat

"We had a woman come in all mad at her husband," says Stacy Hayden, owner Paul Barren's fiancée and business partner. "He thought her mask was some kind of dip, and, when he tasted it, he threw it out because he thought it had gone bad."

Guys have taken bites of the After Dinner Rub, a chocolate mint massage bar that looks like a gooey chocolate cookie. One unfortunate man mistook the lip balm for butter and spread it on a baked potato.

Who can blame the poor fellows when all evidence suggests a delicious snack? Visit the store, sniff around, and see for yourself. The Elixir bath cookie looks deceptively like a snickerdoodle. The Ultimate Chunk masquerades as a cupcake. Made with baking soda, it fizzes like an Alka-Seltzer in your tub.

A Clean Business

When you visit, make sure to chat with Paul, who cooked up the business out of one part hobby and one part allergy. "1 used commercial soaps, got out of the shower, and scratched like a monkey," he says. An avid cook, he started fooling around the kitchen, mixing a dash of lye with herbs, oils, and spices.

The result was a culinary bath and skin care line that saved his skin and changed his life. He opened the shop in Franklin, and after seven years, Paul has become a local soap star with a clean and sweet-smelling following of devoted customers (despite a few disgruntled husbands). If you can't visit him in person, you can buy his goodies on the Web at www.bathosonline.com. KIM CROSS

Bathos: 416 Main Street, Franklin, TN 37064; (615) 790-0151.

Copyright Southern Progress Corporation Nov 2005
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