Does fruit packed shower gel contribute towards your five-a-day?

Consumer Correspondant Miles Anour investigates

Take a look at the photo on your left. Two identical bottles of shower gel. “So what?” I hear you ask.

Look a little closer. The one on the left contains forty (yes 40) limes, but the one on the right contains a pathetic ten lemons.

Have you ever wondered how they get a lime, lemon or any other fruit into a bottle? Now, I have no reason to disbelieve that the claims that there are forty limes in that green liquid, and I’m sure they are all real and zingy, but I’d struggle to squeeze one of the zingers into a bottle let alone forty.

Even assuming that they employ a lime squeezing operative to get every last drop out of the citrus sensation I’m certain that a lot gets thrown away, otherwise there would be more lumpy bits. So even if there are forty of the green monsters huddling in your shower bottle like a bunch of Martians, you can be sure that they’ve lost the odd limb or reproductive organ in the process.

In comparison with the damaged limes in the green gel, lobbing ten lemons in the yellow shower gel looks positively stingy. Ten? Why not twenty, thirty or even forty like the lime product? Well I’ll tell you.

Look closely at the label and you will see that in addition to the zesty (not zingy, but still a Z word) lemons, the gel contains a tree. Again we have to deduce that there is only one tree as the plural isn’t used but even so a whole tree is pretty impressive. If I was promoting this product, I’d be shouting this from the, er.., tree tops:

<em>‘Contains a whole tree, oh, and a couple of bits of fruit, but we’ve taken the squirrels out for the veggies.’

Some people have no idea, perhaps they’ve run out of Z words?

So, is the product any good? Well, they’re both OK but, despite the high fruit content, I wouldn’t add it to gin. Personally, I prefer a rub down with a raw pineapple. It contributes towards my five a day and the prickles do wonders for exfoliation.