How I fell in love with Badedas

Badedas is a somewhat obscure (dare I say niche) German bath product. It smells strongly like pine mixed with bleach, but in a good way. Those who remember using it will know that it turns your bath water bright green. One of its key ingredients is “horse chestnut”, which is supposedly good for improving circulation.

Badedas’ 80s advertisements were famously sexy and utterly cheesy. In one, a woman stares into the distance as the sun sets; cut to a shirtless man riding a horse; back to the woman, who runs her hands through her hair; close up on galloping hooves; the woman removes her peignoir, in silhouette; the horse man slaps his thigh as thunder claps; the woman is in a bath and reaches for Badedas; rain falls on leaves; the man rubs his foamy chest (distinct centaur erotica overtones); and then a voiceover: Things happen after a Badedas bath. Jilly Cooper namechecks Badedas in Turn Right at Spotted Dog, Women and Super Women, and Octavia, where some stud uses the phrase “sleep in the raw”.

For me, Badedas is synonymous with adulthood as seen when you’re a child: the things your parents have that seem wildly sophisticated and out of reach, like Ferrero Rocher, Eau Dynamisante and anchovies. I forgot about Badedas until a little while ago when the words that appear on its bottle popped into my head, like a sexy whisper: Badedas, vital bad. A few days later, I spotted some in a friend’s bathroom. Badedas! I squeaked. Badedas! And walked outside with the bottle, pointing – Badedas! We were at the kind of Sunday barbecue that always makes me think of being a child listening to adults at dinner parties. My father, a great believer in the power of baths to solve any problem, had a rule about dinner parties, which was that past my bedtime I could stay at the table as long as I wanted, provided I only listened: it was the grownups’ turn to talk.

For my 12th birthday at my mom’s house – where a near-empty bottle of Badedas was undoubtedly lying in the toiletry graveyard that is the cupboard below the bathroom sink, beside Herbal Essences shampoo, flaky bars of soap and V05 hot oil hair treatment capsules – I decided I wanted a school night dinner party with my family. After a bit of “Last year before you’re a horrible teenager, eh” and “Excited for high school?”-type chat, they forgot all about me. My sister and I watched the worried candle-lit faces of the adults as they spoke a little too quietly and quickly. It was the 13th of September 2001 – two days after 9/11.

Now, Badedas also means early summer and turning 29 in Sydney, a city to which I moved almost two years ago with my husband, a week after getting married in South Africa, where I am from. I was homesick for months, cry-singing in the car to the same four songs on repeat, my wailing interrupted only by the Google Maps voice – I had no idea where I was going without it.

Badedas’ internet profile is refreshingly low: It has a three-sentence Wikipedia entry. It is mentioned occasionally in forums with names like Mumsnet – “Lasts yonks smells lush” – or in comments by readers in the Guardian – “Badedas (the new fangled hygge is summed up in a bath of this)”. On YouTube, there is a small-scale Italian meme where people are singing, to the tune of “Another one bites the dust”, Mi lavo col Badedas. There are ads in Japanese, Greek, German, Russian and Italian. The Australian Badedas ad ends with the totally normal instruction “Just add water and stir gently with your body”. An ad for a children’s version of Badedas features three girls sitting in descending height order in a bathtub, and boys dancing in a gym shower.

All of them are unmistakably the buoyant product of the world before Y2K, the GFC, and mass extinction. These clips are a reminder that once upon a time the news didn’t make you feel you’d stepped out of a too-hot bath on a muggy afternoon: sort of queasy, overwhelmed and damp; red as a boiled lobster, claws flailing helplessly in the air. They’re a reminder that the world seems so much worse today than I thought it would be when I was little. Everyone hates Ferrero Rocher now.

But lately, despite it all, I’ve felt settled in Sydney. A little optimistic, even. A bath in the summer rain, some pungent German soap and a little bit of the world feels within my control. I feel at home. For a moment, it’s just as they said it would be: “Things happen after a Badedas bath.”