TSA-Defeating Personal Hygiene: Just Add Water

Given the TSA's restrictions on bringing carry-on liquids aboard planes, the mini-sized hygiene industry has predictably exploded. (Maybe a bad choice of words.) But why just pack a collection of tiny personal-care products into your handbag when you can dodge the restrictions entirely with space-age rehydration technology? What if you could bring aboard soap, shampoo, conditioner, and shaving cream without actually carrying any liquid at all? Welcome to the future!

I joke. This space-age technology is neither particularly new nor shocking, but it's carving out a niche in the travel convenience market. Among various similar doodads, Passengers Only is selling the hygiene product "sheets" made by Travelon. The little pods of laundry soap, hand soap, body wash, shampoo, conditioner, and shaving stuff each contain 50 sheets, with each sheet about the size of a couple postage stamps. Add water, and presto, it's time to get cleansed.

I rarely bother to carry on stuff like this even in liquid form, mostly because I'm a pig who depends on the kindness of strangers or quirks of fate to get near a resupply in times of travel stress. But I decided to try out these insta-liquid sheets to see how they perform. Note that I didn't test the laundry soap, as who does their own laundry anymore? What is this, pioneer times?

Hand Soap Sheets: Does the job. A single sheet instantly dissolves, with a spritz of water, into a smallish lather of soap -- much like a squirt from a dispenser. Slight antiseptic odor to satisfy germaphobes.

Body Wash: Here I encounter the main functional problem of the product, as every pod warns, "Remove sheets with dry hand." Kind of difficult in the shower. Takes close to ten sheets to get enough soap action going on my bod. These sheets are curiously green, while all the others are white. They also have a very slight Irish Springlike smell, and they seem to work well overall. But when rinsing, I realize that many little green nodules of undissolved soapstuff have secreted themselves in inconvenient crevices all over my person. I think I got them all.

Shampoo Sheets: More problems handling the sheets when my corpus is already damp, but I only slightly pre-dissolve the sheets that I remove to get shampooey. I sport a modest coiff presently, but it still takes about a half-dozen sheets to get sufficient lather. No detectable odor.

Conditioner Sheets: These seem identical to the shampoo sheets, but they're curiously resistant to dissolving; after a lot of energetic smooshing, I'm still left with a goopy blob that I finally discard down the drain. Again, no smell, and not perceptibly different, feel-wise, from the shampoo.

Shaving Sheets: Certainly not shaving cream. A half-dozen of these coat the hands in thick, white viscosity. After rubbing on my wet whiskers, I was dismayed to see the stuff start to vanish and/or absorb into my skin. It's eating me! Not really, and I was surprised that whatever film remained actually allowed a decent shave.

None of these sheets were better than the real thing, though all would do in a pinch. I did notice that use of any seemed to leave one's hands kinda wrinkly and slick, like after swimming awhile in a chlorinated pool. In addition to avoiding TSA hassle, the main benefit of packing these sheets is that they're much lighter than liquid equivalents. Supposedly biodegradable, with luck none of your undissolved goop will end up clogging the aquifers or mutating the algae. That said, I'll be most impressed when they start selling 50-sheet pods of vodka shots.