Sydney Sweeney's bathwater soap for 'dirty little boys' takes the celebrity cast-off biscuit
Think I'm kidding? It has emerged that
Sydney Sweeney
, this generation's Betty Grable (if that's not
Sabrina Carpenter
), is selling traces of her bathwater to panting fans. You can't just buy a pint of the stuff. It comes embedded in a 'medium grit' soap called Sydney's Bathwater Bliss. 'A perfect combination of the two best places on the planet: The outdoors and Sydney Sweeney's bathtub,' the manufacturer
brags
.
Unsurprisingly, social media was soon queasily reminding itself of a scene from
Emerald Fennell's
recent film
Saltburn
. During a moment of passionate desperation, Oliver Quick, in the form of
Barry Keoghan
, sups thirstily at the plughole while water drains from the tub in which Felix Catton, played sleekly by
Jacob Elordi
, has just, well, shaken hands with the milkman (as the Bible didn't quite euphemise).
Sweeney, star of the hit series Euphoria and films such as Anyone But You, hasn't exactly been backing away from innuendo. 'Hello, you dirty little boys, are you interested in my body' – long pause – 'wash?' she purred in an earlier commercial for the Dr Squatch brand while up to her oxters in bubble bath.
READ MORE
One can only imagine the requests that came in. When fans start asking for your bathwater, she responded, you can either ignore it or turn it into a bar of soap. 'It's weird in the best way.' Is that really the 'best way' of being weird?
If one wished to get hot under the collar one could rank this with the underground trade in alleged celebrity cast-offs. If you want
Channing Tatum's
old sock then some charlatan will happily sell you something pretending to be that. If one wished to get hotter still one could wearily reference the ancient practice of praying to the sheddings and effusions of the beatified. The alleged finger clippings and trimmed hair of St Clare, an associate of St Francis, are on display in Assisi. A sliver of the tongue of St Anthony of Padua is said to be preserved in Sri Lanka.
Is this what has become of us? Is St Sydney of Spokane the contemporary equivalent of those broken on medieval wheels for the sin of Christian belief? Do we now pray to homoeopathically low levels of her bathwater as our grandparents once genuflected to the dandruff of St Bunterbottom?
Of course not. If the release of Bathwater Bliss ($8 a bar from the Dr Squatch website, and probably sold out by now) speaks of anything interesting, it is of contemporary stars' shameless enthral to irony. It would require a hugely underdeveloped sense of humour not to recognise the project as an enormous joke. Like Carpenter, Sweeney has had fun marketing the sort of perky, coy sexuality that Grable – a pin-up now almost forgotten but once the most popular star in the United States – exploited during the 1930s and 1940s. Sweeney's earlier bathtub commercial has, appropriately given the setting, a playful cleanliness that suggests all innuendo is for entertainment purposes only.
It also reminds us of the wider need for contemporary celebrities to diversify. When
Paul Newman
launched his Newman's Own salad dressings, in 1982, the project was viewed as an oddball one-off. His fame needed no boost. The profits all went to charity.
George Foreman's
endorsement, in 1994, of the grill that still bears his name played as an enormous joke. 'It's so good I put my name on it!' he chuckled in the ads.
Saltburn: Barry Keoghan in Emerald Fennell's film
Business is now a serious business. Celebrity endorsements and side projects are, to contemporary stars, at least as significant as the supposed core activity. Everyone has a booze brand. Steven Soderbergh has a
'floral brandy'
. Beyoncé has a
'Scotch-inspired American rye'
. Dr Dre and Snoop Dogg have a
gin
. If you don't secure a liquor deal then, like
Jennifer Lopez
,
Billie Eilish
and (no, really)
Brian May
, you grab one for perfumes.
Not even Karl Marx could have envisioned the cynical flexibility of 21st-century capitalism. It is not enough to profit from one source. That seed revenue must then be fed into a matrix of interdependent schemes that transform mere prosperity into obscene wealth.
[
Sydney Sweeney's rise: Hollywood finally has an old-school movie star on its hands, and it has no idea what to do
Opens in new window
]
None of which is to wag a finger at Sweeney for what, rather than a signal of apocalyptic decadence, feels like an amusing jape at the expense of the overzealous fan. Other stars should take note.
Glen Powell
could flog followers his soiled face wipes.
Paul Mescal
could cast his used teabags into decorative jewellery. Or maybe not. Never allow a good joke to outstay its welcome.
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Irish Times
5 hours ago
- Irish Times
Humourless raging against Sydney Sweeney's American Eagle jeans ad is pointless
Sydney Sweeney , a young hot blonde Hollywood starlet, is in an advertisement for clothing brand American Eagle. She writhes around the floor trying to do up a pair of denim jeans, with an almost inhumanly good body and doe eyes. 'Genes', she says, 'are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair colour, personality and even eye colour. My jeans are blue.' The tagline of the entire campaign: Sydney Sweeney has great jeans. I think it's clever, it might even be funny. Enter the advertising hall of fame, with the Budweiser Clydesdales, Coca-Cola Christmas Truck, Guinness Toucans, and now Sydney Sweeney's jeans. It is also what Hollywood is for: beautiful people, selling us things. The amateur bores among us have tried to argue about celebrities and body positivity and responsible, inclusive marketing for years, even decades now. They argued that corporations possessed some abstract ethical duty to turn their desire to make a profit into a progressive political argument. This particular constituency was never going to win the case. It's just too worthy, finger-waggy and po-faced. The movement – call it woke, call it social justice, whatever – spiralled into total decline by 2023. Their moralising decadence was revealed as not part of the grand arc of history, but instead a sociological blip. We know all of this to be true by now. So, I was full of admiration for the last remaining hangers-on as they came out in full force to condemn Sweeney and American Eagle, their howls of rage wrapped up in some illiterate rhetoric about late-stage capitalism. I think it is brave to come out swinging knowing that you lost the argument a long time ago. My version of the instinct is my continued, visceral defence of James Cameron's 2009 film Avatar . What were they so mad about? First, the obvious: don't sexualise women. Second, the insane: the play on words between jeans and genes is not innocent fun but instead promoting a white supremacist project of eugenics. Sweeney is blonde with blue eyes… and we are celebrating her DNA? 'We all know where this one goes,' they say, with straight faces and encumbered intellects. My one regret about the entire charade is that American Eagle deleted the videos from their feeds. They didn't need to capitulate – the cohort raging against them is small, culturally disenfranchised, and too humourless to worry about. READ MORE And then, plot twist: Sweeney was revealed to be a registered Republican . Donald Trump was thrilled and delivered a cheering speech. 'You'd be surprised at how many people are Republicans… If Sydney Sweeney is a registered Republican, I think her ad is fantastic.' Later, he turned his pen to the subject, and wrote on Truth Social: 'Sydney Sweeney, a registered Republican, has the HOTTEST ad out there… Go get 'em Sydney.' I'm not on these guys sides' either, but at least they have a sense of fun. Of course everyone is quick to declare victory: 'Woke is dead in advertising' one Telegraph columnist declared, Telegraph - ically, on a podcast. 'The vibe shift, she lives' goes the chorus. This is the final nail in the coffin for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and all those painting-defacing lunatics. Finally, the inevitable cultural victory for the right is here, as it was always meant to be. So runs the argument, anyway. (I wonder if these people have also failed to observe the ambient politics of the year: DEI policies still exist pretty much everywhere; universities are still under the cosh of activist students; we are still entertaining discussions about whether Ireland needs a dedicated woman's museum.) So, I think they are wrong too. The most frustrating thing for the disenfranchised social-progressives of the 2010s is not that they lost the culture war to a huge Conservative Machine, typified now by Sweeney's genetic hegemony, but instead that they lost to something far more benign entirely: the centre. Because none of this episode is actually mainstream vindication for the worst political impulses of a Trump administration – trying to make that case is ludicrous. It's just a light social correction to the moral excesses of the past decade; a hand held out in the dark to say 'it's okay, you're allowed to have fun'; it is a victory for aesthetic liberation more than it has anything to do with politics. [ Sydney Sweeney is selling her bathwater. What has become of us? Opens in new window ] We should always return to the original text; look at the advert itself. Is the genes thing a bit right wing? Sure, whatever. But really this is Norman Rockwell's sentimental realism; Taylor Swift's 'screeching tires of true love'; Bruce Springsteen's stadia; hamburgers and milkshakes; corn silos in a flyover state; shanty towns in Appalachia; multi-lane highways; and clacking boardwalks of Coney Island. It's just Americana, in all of its cliches and superlatives. The company is literally called American Eagle, what did you expect it to do? In the great pendulum swing of politics, Sweeney in 2025 marks something: not a stake in the ground for Conservative values; but just a general and gentle loosening of cultural shibboleths. That really is a victory.
Irish Examiner
9 hours ago
- Irish Examiner
Sydney Sweeney: the Hollywood up-and-comer who started a culture war
Almost exactly three years ago, in July 2022, the actor Sydney Sweeney gave an interview to the Hollywood Reporter that was refreshingly frank about finances. At the time, Ms Sweeney was 24, fresh off the contentious buzz of Euphoria's second season, and undeniably on the up in Hollywood as one of gen Z's very few in-demand actors. And yet, as she told the magazine, she did not have the money to cover even a six-month break from the industry. Unlike some of her Euphoria peers, Ms Sweeney is not a nepo baby; she was raised middle-class in northern Idaho and Spokane, Washington, and began working as a child actor at 13. She acted continuously throughout her teens — on Criminal Minds and Grey's Anatomy, then small roles on prestige projects like Sharp Objects, The Handmaid's Tale and Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood — because there was no fallback cushion. 'I don't have someone supporting me, I don't have anyone I can turn to, to pay my bills or call for help,' she said. Even after working on a hit HBO show, which did allow her to buy a house in LA, money was tight. 'They don't pay actors like they used to, and with streamers, you no longer get residuals,' Ms Sweeney explained. 'The established stars still get paid, but I have to give 5% to my lawyer, 10% to my agents, 3% or something like that to my business manager. I have to pay my publicist every month, and that's more than my mortgage.' Ms Sweeney spoke with the authority and detail of someone who actually had to review her budget every month — for the stylist, the publicist, the makeup, the travel, the unspoken demands of being a fame-aiming young actor in the Instagram age, and particularly a young beautiful woman. Hence, her many brand deals — Miu Miu, Armani, Laneige. 'If I just acted, I wouldn't be able to afford my life in LA,' she said. 'I take deals because I have to.' I still think about this interview whenever Sweeney's name comes up, which is too often lately. For one, it's still the most transparent I've ever heard an actor of her cohort be about money — no one is talking about paying their publicist or their mortgage — and two, it helps explain her increasingly omnipresent and fractious brand deals that have arguably eclipsed her acting work. Ms Sweeney doesn't just rep high-end fashion labels like Miu Miu, typical for actors attempting to enter the rarefied field of movie stardom; she's now also selling soap allegedly containing a 'touch' of her bathwater for Dr Squatch, ice-cream for Baskin-Robbins, and fuzzy pink loafers for who knows who. Sydney Sweeney in American Eagle Jeans. You may have heard that she's recently found herself in the culture-war crosshairs over some ads for American Eagle. As the camera pans over a horizontal Ms Sweeney zipping up her tight blue jeans, she says in typical monotone: 'Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair colour, personality, and even eye colour. My jeans are blue.' Another spot finds her admonishing a wandering camera away from her two most talked-about assets — 'eyes up here'. The ad, predictably, caused a stir on an internet where everything is now ragebait – the posting left said its invocation of Americana and 'great genes' dogwhistled white supremacy, the Maga right celebrated it as a nail in the coffin of 'wokeness'. (For what it's worth, American Eagle has said that the campaign 'is and always was about the jeans'.) Mr Trump posted about it on Truth Social. And all of that was before it was revealed that Ms Sweeney registered as a Republican in Florida in June 2024. All of this, it must be noted, has happened without Ms Sweeney publicly saying a thing. (One can assume, based on her comments about money and an old social media brouhaha about Maga family members, that she supported Donald Trump in 2024, and that she moved to Florida for tax reasons. But until Sweeney confirms anything, these remain assumptions.) How does a relatively successful Hollywood actor with at least one box office hit under her belt — that would be the middling but popular 2024 romcom Anyone But You — end up this polarising? Two separate but inextricable things: an incendiary combination of social media's death spiral into hollow, fleeting culture wars, and a career spent walking the perilously thin line between poking fun at male egos and inflating them. The former is more easily identified — the internet culture Substack Garbage Day traced the American Eagle controversy to a familiar pattern of activity on X, a site that is a fraction of the size it used to be and is now about 75% bots; the remaining holdouts are 'conservative aggregators, business world influencers, celebrity stan accounts, and libs who won't leave the site and still post like it's 2018'. The ad, an artless mix of lowest-common-denominator triggers, worked on all four groups. The cycle frothed enough on X over a weekend to get picked up by Fox News, then the most smug Maga politicians looking for a dunk, and then, inevitably, the president who must always get in on the attention. In the posting economy, all that matters is that the controversy feels real, and everyone is talking about it. Whatever the actual size of the outrage — I, for one, sense more fatigue than actual anger — the chatter does represent a natural endpoint to Ms Sweeney's longstanding tactic of being the first to acknowledge, and now bank on, male attention on her breasts, and to be ruthlessly pragmatic about business. Both are dubious tactics with, I'd argue, diminishing returns. I have been a fan of Ms Sweeney's since she broke out as a terrifyingly droll gen Z menace on the first season of The White Lotus in 2021, and I date the shift to 2022, around the time of that landmark THR interview. When I interviewed Ms Sweeney in 2021, the then-23-year-old was as open about her business ambitions — getting a bachelor's degree to prevent getting 'fucked over' by contract negotiations, producing her own projects — as she was wary about the internet's outrage machine. She was promoting her erotic thriller The Voyeurs, in which she appeared nude, and dealing with the aftermath of nude screenshots from Euphoria making the rounds online. Her strategy for handling it all, she told me, was dissociation: 'I never actually put Syd out there,' she said. 'No one really knows Syd.' In the years since, Ms Sweeney seems to have adopted a more offensive approach to the attention — and her elevation by the male right as, to quote the New Yorker's Lauren Michele Jackson, 'rejoicing in a perceived return to a bygone beauty standard in the wake of all that overzealous feminism they blame on the left' — by turning it into money and a punchline. Sydney Sweeney attending the Vanity Fair Oscar Party in 2024. She poked fun at boob fixation with a Hooters skit on SNL; she wore a sweatshirt blaring 'SORRY FOR HAVING GREAT TITS AND CORRECT OPINIONS'; she routinely addresses the boobs in the room with a broad-like confidence. 'The biggest misconception about me is that I'm a dumb blonde with big tits,' she said in an interview last year. 'I'm naturally a brunette.' Cue laughs. Sydney Sweeney as Cecilia in Immaculate. At the same time, she's exemplified the pop feminist mantra of getting one's bag — starring in the dreadful Madame Web was a 'business decision' to network with Sony execs and get her planned Barbarella remake greenlit and Anyone But You sold, which she successfully marketed on her own TikTok. Taking every brand deal while producing would-be auteur horror with Immaculate. All of this has, unfortunately, overshadowed a promising dramatic acting career, as demonstrated by a remarkable turn in Reality, as a real-life whistleblower brimming with anxiety and righteousness; in The Voyeurs, a throwback erotic thriller that would have made more of a splash had it not been dropped on Amazon; on Euphoria, where she imbued the beleaguered Cassie with a real sense of teenage volatility. Amid the political controversy, Ms Sweeney remains, as ever, booked and busy. She's making an awards play with Christy, as the 90s boxer Christy Martin, aiming critical buzz with The Housemaid, Paul Feig's film alongside Amanda Seyfried. She's locked down two huge video game remakes with Michael Bay and Jon M Chu, secured the role of 50s bombshell Kim Novak in Colman Domingo's directorial debut Scandalous!, and just appeared alongside Julianne Moore in yet another forgettable Apple TV+ film. On the acting side, she's still the young woman from three years ago, clear-eyed about the industry, trying everything, lining up the work. For all our sakes, let's hope the conversation gets back there, too. The Guardian
Irish Daily Mirror
a day ago
- Irish Daily Mirror
Lions players stun fans with sing-song at Sydney bar
The British and Irish Lions celebrated their series victory over Australia in grand style, taking over a Sydney hotel bar and bursting into song as amazed fans looked on. Andy Farrell's squad became the first Lions tourists since 2013 to win their Test series, with triumphs over the Wallabies in Brisbane and Melbourne securing them the trophy after also winning all of their other matches on Australian soil. However, that streak came to an end as they were denied a historic 3-0 whitewash, with Australia deservedly clinching an eventful final Test in Sydney. The disappointment of losing the third Test didn't seem to linger, however, as the following day saw Farrell's lads celebrate as they dropped in at the popular Coogee Bay Hotel for a bit of lunch. According to fans who were also in the hotel bar on Sunday, the team stayed there in the afternoon and provided some entertainment as they broke out into a sing-song. With Wales star Jac Morgan at the centre of the action alongside captain Maro Itoje, the tourists belted out classics like Oasis' Wonderwall and Adele's Someone Like You at full volume, with videos of their performances soon making the rounds on social media, reports Wales Online. The squad celebrated by belting out the traditional Scottish folk song The Bonnie Banks o' Loch Lomond, a tune they had previously sung on the pitch at the Melbourne Cricket Ground after securing the series in the second Test. Joe Hare, a fan of Wales and the Lions, was in the pub at the same time as the players. His videos of their singing have already been shared on TikTok by big names such as England's Marcus Smith. Joe's footage of the team's performance of The Bonnie Banks o' Loch Lomond - featuring forwards like Morgan, Jamie George, Itoje and Will Stuart - came with the cheeky caption: "Pack weight, 900kg. Vocal range, questionable." Meanwhile, he added that "the only strong than [the Lions'] scrum is their pub version of Wonderwall post-win," with his clips already viewed tens of thousands of times on TikTok. "They came in for lunch and stayed in the afternoon," Joe, who is from Cardiff but lives in New Zealand, told WalesOnline. "They were really great to the fans and a real energy. It was a pretty awesome experience and it's been a great trip." After losing in the final Test, Farrell admitted that it "might take one or two beers" for his players to understand what they had achieved on tour, as he described the experience as "the time of our lives". "There's frustration because we wanted to win every game, but the best team won here," the head coach said. "It might take one or two beers, but they should be unbelievably proud of what they've achieved on this tour. "It's been the time of our lives. I know it sounds a bit dramatic, but it's the truth. We got to create a special memory together. I'm unbelievably proud to be associated with this group. "This has been a long time in the planning - the best eight weeks of our lives," he added. "Lions tours are tough, and to do what we did last week and put the series in the bag, upon reflection after tonight, I'm sure we'll be super proud of the achievement."
