Shampoo shenanigans and stuff

How is it that my husband can go through shampoo so fast?

A quick aside for more information - my husband has a skin allergy that renders him completely scaly and pimply and gross from regular soaps.  (I'm sure he's going to just LOVE that I told you all about his eczema.)  *I* (insert preening) figured it out and found him a soap that he could use as well as a shampoo and conditioner.  But that left us with all the other soaps and shampoos that we'd bought in our mad attempt to cure him and I've been steadily using them up, one after another, for the last two years.

You'd think I'd be done or that we must have had a MOUNTAIN of soaps and shampoos going at the time.  And I'm starting to think that your assumptions must be right, because DAMN I am *still* working on that last bottle of regular shampoo and I am no closer to getting rid of the two half bottles of Head & Shoulders (copyright trademarked blah blah blah) than I was a few years ago.

Part of the problem is that when I go off on excavation I can't take the HUGE bottles of shampoo and soap I have sitting in the shower and so buy smaller bottles to start me off and then I get stuck buying more while I'm abroad and then I bring it home and now I've got TWO bottles to finish instead of one.

You could suggest that I throw it away... but that goes against every fiber of my being.  Obviously, $20 worth of shampoo, soap, conditioner etc. is not going to bankrupt me... but a very large chunk of my soul wants to scream "it's not like we're rolling in cash, either, sweetheart" and I just can't do it.  I also keep left-over pasta (you can re-heat it by dropping it into boiling water for 30 seconds and you'd never notice that it was older than newly made pasta) and my husband will not throw away the tube of toothpaste until he's absolutely sure he's gotten the last bit of toothpaste out.  Usually this results in less and less toothpaste actually getting on his toothbrush, until I point out, "uh, honey, I don't think there actually *is* any toothpaste on your toothbrush" and he sheepishly admits that maybe, just maybe, he's gotten all the toothpaste out... at least all the toothpaste that can be gotten out without resorting to surgery.  If he didn't know that I'd kill him dead, I'm sure he'd use my nail scissors to gut the tube for that last little bit.

We joke about it.  We laugh over how he scrapes the last of the toothpaste out of the lid and I add water to the last of the soap dispenser to make sure we get EVERY LAST BUBBLE.  We laugh at my propensity to empty hotels of their soaps (hey, they're going to throw it away anyway, I'm just saving them the trouble) and his practically invisible socks (so thin that one of these days a load will go into the wash and NEVER RETURN!).  Sometimes we'll throw away the leftover pasta (but only if it's not enough to make a meal of the next day and NEVER if there is leftover sauce) because we aren't REALLY that poor.  I mean, there was The Month Of Cabbage a few years back.  *That* was poor.  We can afford organic eggs now.

But.  Still.

Why does my husband have to go through shampoo so fast??

It really boggles my mind.  He's got far less hair than I do.  And SOAP!  Okay, he's bigger than I am.  Or was.  Because at this point, we weigh about the same amount and I'm pretty sure I've caught up with him in overall surface area AND YET it has taken me four months to go through a little bottle of soap, during which time he's gone through THREE bottles that are THREE TIMES the size of my little bottle.  WHAT IS HE DOING IN THERE??  I've been in the bathroom when he showers.  I know he turns off the water, like a good environmentally contentious young man, to soap up, so I know he's not rinsing it off faster than he can slap it on.

But I'm starting to have the suspicion that he's possibly forgetting that he's washed and he's repeating himself in the shower.  Like he enters some time-loop and keeps repeating the same motions again and again, only time is not repeating, it's continually moving forwards and the soap is simply getting used up.

Evidence:
1) He takes twice as long in the shower than I do.

I'm a woman.  We're designed by nature to take longer in the shower and yet I take 10 minutes (okay, it's inching up to 20 because I can't bend over or stand on one leg for very long, so reaching the soap on the lower shelf and getting my legs up high enough to be scrubbed takes some slow careful maneuvers, if it wasn't so utterly grotesque it might be considered performance art - but his showers have also gotten proportionally longer).  I'm in the bathroom when he's showering three days out of the week and I know that he spends the entire time in there lathering and scrubbing (I tend to spend the majority of my time rinsing) and seriously, it should not take that long UNLESS HE IS WASHING EVERY PART THREE TIMES WITH VAST QUANTITIES OF SOAP!!

2) He has no memory of what he's doing in the shower.

Conversation from a few weeks ago -
DB: (in the shower) Um, so, baby, can I ask you something?
AG: Yeah...
DB: Water seems to be getting into the soap and it makes it really watery and hard to use and so, um, if you could, you know, remember, to... uh, close the lid, you know, after, uh, you... uh, use it... that would be, um, really great...
AG: Honey, I don't *use* your soap, remember?
(Pause)
DB: Oh, so I guess it's me then.
AG: Gotta be.

And since then, 9 times out of 10 when I get into the shower, I end up closing his soap because HE STILL FORGETS TO DO IT.

So there, if he's washing himself and then forgetting that he's washed himself, this could in fact lead to the kind of shower loop that increases soap and shampoo usage to the point where I'm buying him a new bottle of soap from the organic shop every two weeks.  They must think I've got a particularly large family that all uses the same bottle of soap.  I've bought them out of their stock.  I've got to go in there and ask them to restock, please, because we're about to be out again and I wasn't able to get any more on the mainland (having, I think, possibly bought THEM all out of this soap too).  Really, at this point, I ought to call the manufacturer and ask to purchase a case because we go through it so bloody fast.

Or really, I should make the DB do it because he's the one using it all up.  The soapy beast.