Tattling About Toiletries

OK, I admit it: In the countless hundreds of hotel rooms rented over many decades I have very often filched some or most of the in-room toiletries provided for guests.

Well, the fancy or unique ones, anyway. The best of the best of such treasures invariably come from top lodging properties overseas, but I've been surprised once in awhile by what nice stateside hotels have to offer.

When I pack my bags on that last night to go home, I find it irresistible to raid the bath counter and see what's there that might be worth the extra weight. Sometimes it's soap (hand or bath); sometimes shampoo or hair conditioner; sometimes combs, shoe mitts, Q-tips, cotton balls, or even shower caps! Whatever gets palmed and packed, it can't be mundane; it's got to have special appeal, something that attracts my fancy.

Come on, who can resist a soap perfumed with real sandalwood or violet blossoms? Especially if packaged in a luxurious pastel tissue paper wrapper with a brilliant crimson-colored hand-tied bow of some exotic twine (yep, I've seen that very soap, emanating an alluring floral aroma of unknown origin, in a deluxe Hong Kong hotel--and took it home).

Soaps in weird shapes or colors grab my attention, as do strange or extraordinary fragrances. A plain-Jane thin bar of Hampton Inn soap? Forget it. Not worth the trouble. Ditto for Marriott Courtyard amenities.

In fact one of the uses I make of the luxe soaps is to keep one or two handy in my Dopp kit for those times when I find myself in a Best Western in rural North Dakota with those pitiful, dinky chips of soap that BW maid service staff have been placing in guest rooms since about the early 1960s (one could certainly not call the microscopic bit they provide a "bar" of soap). When in such modest circumstances, what a pleasure it is to unwrap a beautiful soap from, say, the Grand Hyatt Bali before stepping into the shower. As the sumptuous fumes of my elegant soap from halfway around the globe waft up through the warm water, why, I can almost forget that I am residing in a Red Roof Inn in Chicken Foot, Arkansas. (Or was that Bentonville?)

Another use of those stolen soaps is to provide an uplift to mood at home. Washing with a tropical scented soap acquired from an island paradise hotel in Fiji or Barbados can do wonders to pick up my spirits on a frigid mid-winter weekend. I also keep a supply of exotic soaps and grandly-packaged shampoos and such for spiffing up the guest bath when friends overnight. Why not give them a taste of what the best foreign hostelries have to offer?

Over the years, though, I've stopped taking home most shampoos and bath counter doo-dads other than soap because, well, because most of it is no longer worth the trouble (to me at least). It's not because of the absurd 3-oz. TSA liquid carry-on rule, either. Rather, it's that most of the counter-top goodies are not special enough to merit my attention these days.

However, one item that I almost always grab, even at the lowliest place of lodging, is the shower cap. Why? Because of its utility in my mother-in-law's kitchen. She goes through hotel shower caps like crazy covering bowls of leftovers and salads and desserts and so on. My wife's mom has amazed me demonstrating the usefulness of a round piece of plastic with an elastic band in her kitchen. I sheepishly admit that my wife and I have even tried it at home--to good advantage.

So, who else out there will admit to purloining the bits and bobs used for grooming and hygiene that hotel marketeers use to lure us to their properties?

And is it thievery to take their bathroom baubles? I am not taking their fluffy towels or the flat-screen HD TV, after all. I'm merely making off with some of the consumables that I, you, everyone pays for in the room rate, right? If we don't take the soap, will they credit back a dollar or two per night? Answer: no.

So far I've never had a hotel GM interrogate me about the absence of a bar of their extravagant soap from a guest room I recently vacated. In fact many have asked me to return every week for a year or longer. I take that as a sign that my slight but nagging feeling of guilt for sometimes pilfering a few hotel toiletries is not, after all, eroding my probity.

Thus I will probably persist in cramming a stupid shower cap or two into my suitcase to present to my mom-in-law when next I see her. Mind you, I have plenty of extras. Let me know if you need one to keep the bugs off your salad bowl next time you have a picnic on the patio. It's very effective; you really should try it!