How packaging & design makes it hard to distinguish between 'olive shower gel' and 'olive oil'

The British woman who recently confessed that her cooking tasted foul because she discovered later that she had used an olive shower gel as the cooking medium instead of oil, deserves our unqualified sympathy. People in India could just as easily be fooled into using an inappropriate avatar of coconut, mustard or sesame. Of course, the fruit’s virtues notwithstanding, the point is moot why people would want to slather olives over themselves as a shower gel — possibly scented with rosemary or oregano — and emerge smelling like a Mediterranean salad, rather than stick to using it in the aforementioned comestible. But they do. And in their haste to extol and emphasise the virtues of the ‘natural’ elements in their products, labels of widely differing genres end up looking suspiciously similar — perhaps by design — and end up confusing customers, as was the case with the olive oil gel that duped the hapless Briton.

With no delineation between ingredients for edible and inedible products, lavender is as likely to be wafting from hand cream as pastry cream — ditto for citrus fruit — and fancy soap descriptions read more like pudding recipes, such confusion can only increase. Worse still, signage indicating disparate categories such as bath products and salad dressings are often ignored. So look before you cook — and bathe.