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Irish Times

Sydney Sweeney's bathwater soap for 'dirty little boys' takes the celebrity cast-off biscuit

Peak decadence is here. Western society has reached – or returned to – the most deranged excesses of the late Roman empire. Appointing donkeys as pope. Boiling ortolan in babies' tears. Those sorts of things. We may as well hand the keys of the city straight over to Alaric the Visigoth. 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.