There is a documentary about soaps airing on TV right now in the background, and there is something that makes my cynical and bitter side so gleeful when they show proud and happy foreign tourists coming to Southern France, buying the famous "Savon de Marseille" soaps while explaining to the television it is because it is "All natural, and good things, and that is some real product very healthy" ; only for the narrator to mention to the audience the soap said tourists are buying is actually a "false" Savon de Marseille, the same industrial soap you find on supermarket shelves everywhere, just slapped with a pseudo-"local product" sticker.
For those of you not aware of the soap politics in French, the famous "savon de Marseille" is just as infamous because the historical appelation could not get any strict legal rules around it. Meaning that a LOT of industrial mass-producers of soap, that make their soaps with palm oil, animal fat and other artificial products from any continent but Europe, can name their product "Marseille soap", the same as the actually made-in-France, by-the-tradition, natural good soap of Provence that is the historically attested one. The confusion is so strong that it is becoming harder and harder to separate the real Marseille soap from the "fake" ones", especially since now the fake ones can mimick perfectly the appearance and feel of the real one and can be sold in actual Marseille and Provence by local people claiming it is THE Marseille soap when it is not.
