You’re Soaking In It
Soaking in it. Literally.
Polish of the Month — May 2026
Madge is still selling dish soap.
For those who missed the era of UHF television, lawn darts, and MTV when it actually played music videos: Madge was the manicurist in the Palmolive ads who spent decades cheerfully informing her clients mid-manicure that they were soaking in dish soap. Softening their hands. The tagline was “you’re soaking in it.” (That’s right. We had three channels, we walked uphill both ways to get to them, and we liked it.)
What I didn’t fully appreciate until recently is that Madge was selling dish soap during the Cold War. Duck and cover drills. The nuclear clock. Mutually assured destruction as foreign policy. And there was Madge, completely unbothered, telling you your hands were soft.
I think about Madge a lot lately.
I was laid off in October 2025. I make nail polish now. Small batch, indie, out of a loft in downtown Houston with a Bengal cat named Beaker who has opinions about my desk setup and no respect for the concept of boundaries. I sell it on the internet to strangers while reading the news and feeling the specific cognitive dissonance of a person who is simultaneously aware that the timeline is stupid and also has invoices to send.
This is not unique to me. Every indie maker I know is doing some version of this. Making their thing: candles, ceramics, zines, soap, nail polish. Keeping one eye on the world and trying to figure out how to do both without losing their mind or their integrity.
The answer, I think, is that you do both. You make the thing. You support your people. You show up at the protest and also at the market. You buy from the small maker and also call your representative. These are not in conflict. They are, in fact, the same impulse: the belief that small things matter. That craft matters. That community matters. That the person next to you matters.
Madge kept selling dish soap. I keep making nail polish. Not because I think everything is going to be fine, but because you still need to eat while you’re learning to stop worrying and love the bomb, and also because making things is the only thing standing between me and screaming into the void full time.
You’re Soaking In It is May’s polish: a peach-to-teal thermochromic with iridescent flake scatter that catches the light like interference on a signal you almost lost, because the current moment felt like exactly the right time to make something pretty and complicated.
It comes with a playlist. It will not make you feel better exactly. It will make you feel understood, which is sometimes the same thing and sometimes completely different.
THE OR ELSE FREQUENCY — May Playlist
“The future isn’t what it used to be, and frankly, we’re not surprised.”
This isn’t a spring playlist for flowers and brunch. It’s an 11-track survival guide for a world that’s currently snap-shifting from the peach-glow of hope to the teal-cold of systemic reality. Curated for the Eat the Rich mood, the 120 BPM heartbeat, and the latchkey kid nostalgia that refuses to stay quiet.
• Rogue Wave — Good Morning (The Future)
• Stray Kids — Do It
• Tiger JK — Love Peace (호심술)
• Arcadia — Election Day
• Bo Burnham — That Funny Feeling
• Liz Phair — Help Me Mary (Live)
• Grandson — Blood // Water
• The Interrupters — Take Back the Power
• Dead Kennedys — Kill the Poor
• They Might Be Giants — Your Racist Friend
