(Image source: Dr. Squatch)

In May 2025, actress Sydney Sweeney partnered with Dr. Squatch, a men’s personal care and hygiene brand, to create “Sydney’s Bathwater Bliss,” a bar of soap containing trace amounts of Sweeney’s bathwater. “Experience the ultimate blend of outdoor serenity with refreshing notes of pine, Douglas fir, earthy moss, and a touch of Sydney’s very own bathwater,” the company website reads. According to advertisements, the soap smells like—ahem—“morning wood.”

Believe it or not, this is not the first time an entrepreneurial woman has sold her used bath water. In 2019, e-girl Bella Delphine made news for selling her bath water at $30 a pop. But this feels different. Sweeney is an A-list actress with a thriving career. As such, her partnership with Dr. Squatch (a $2 billion-dollar company) seems like a watershed moment, representing the mainstreaming and corporatization of a niche fetish.

Although this may seem like just another manifestation of “sex sells,” I think there is something deeper going on here.

One way to understand “Sydney’s Bathwater Bliss” is as a religious relic: an object imbued with holy power by its contact with the divine. In this case, the item is not a holy relic, but a horny relic, marketed to lonely pilgrims in a pornified world. This marketing gimmick succeeds by commodifying the longing for real presence in an age of disembodiment. Like a religious relic, the soap promises to materialize a holy essence—promising contact, even communion, with Saint Sweeney.

***

Social critic Camille Paglia has argued that since the twentieth century the relationship between the American public and celebrities has been, at root, religious: “The Hollywood studio system…projected its manufactured stars as simulacra of the pagan pantheon.” She points out that the word “fans” derives from the Latin fanatici, which originally referred to maddened worshippers of the goddess Cybele. Paglia elaborates: “Outbursts of quasi-religious emotion could be seen in the hysterical response of female fans to Rudolph Valentino, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, and The Beatles.”

But it’s not only female fans who show “quasi-religious emotions” or “hysterical” responses. Male fans, too, denigrated as “simps” on the Internet, fawn after unattainable female celebrities. At the current moment, more men “simp” after Sweeney than after any other woman on the planet. An analysis of global Google searches in April 2025 revealed that Sweeney is the third most-Googled person in the world, with more than 11 million monthly searches, behind only Donald Trump and Taylor Swift. (Taylor Swift, the second-most Googled person in the world, is less a sex symbol than Sweeney; Swift’s appeal is more musical than libidinal. Swift’s fandom skews female; Sweeney’s, not so much. When Sweeney promoted her appearance on Saturday Night Live, she joked with coy self-awareness,“Weirdly, a lot of my fans are men!”)

Sweeney is the sexiest woman in the world, and science can prove it. She’s so hot, in fact, that her very mortality is dubious. She is often described by adoring admirers as a kind of real-life Greek Goddess—an Incarnation of Aphrodite. Sweeney has herself leaned into this designation, tweeting in 2020 that she was “channeling [her] inner greek goddess ✨.” The replies riff on the same theme: “Wow! May I start a pagan religion based around you?” and “I’ll be the Hades to your Persephone.”

This explains why Sweeney, who actually traces her ancestry to Ireland and Scotland, is depicted on the advertisements for “Sydney’s Bathwater Bliss” as a Greek Goddess. The advertisement shows Sweeney, her bosoms tastefully covered by a bustier of bubbles, bathing in a marble bathtub, her lips puckered, her eyes drawn heavenward. She is flanked by marble columns in the famous Corinthian style, each column crowned with ornate acanthus leaves. In the distance, a placid lake, and a snow-capped mountain (Olympus?) piercing fluffy, bubbly-looking clouds.

The packaging of the product also draws on mythical tropes, implicitly linking Sweeney with other mythical bathers like Aphrodite rising from the sea or Diana bathing in the woods. On the back side of the soap’s packaging, Sweeney’s leg lifts languidly from a claw-foot tub. The bath is placed on a stone platform with columns and balustrades. Snow-capped mountains loom in the distance, suggesting a divine, remote, and pristine world. Framing the tub on the left and right are two pedestals, each topped with marble busts of obscured faces: stone voyeurs who coyly pretend to look away from the bathing nymph. The marble busts are us, the consumer, simping after the busty celebrity-goddess. But Sweeney is more Aphrodite than Diana. When someone spotted Diana bathing in the woods, she responded by transforming the intruder into a stag and letting his own hounds devour him. Sweeney, in contrast, invites the gaze, packages it, and sells it, welcoming the viewer not as a trespasser but as a customer. Evoking the name of the goddess she emulates, the packaging teases that her bath water is “one of nature’s finest aphrodisiacs.”

On the front side of the packaging, two Grecian women in draped, toga-like garments pour water from amphorae. It’s unclear whether they are real women, statues, or functioning marble fountains. The monochrome cyan-teal coloration flattens the image into something more engraved than alive—more frieze than photograph—suggesting that these women, though graceful, are stone. Or perhaps they’re something in between: statues on the verge of animation, like Galatea, the sculpted woman brought to life by Aphrodite to satisfy the desires of her creator, Pygmalion. Galatea has become a touchstone for feminist critique since she is often seen as the embodiment of male fantasy. In this light, Sydney Sweeney might also be seen as a kind of Galatea: a figure cast in idealized form, stylized, adored, and made to move—an image tailored to male desire. As one woman commented under Sweeney’s (since deleted) Instagram post announcing her Dr. Squatch partnership, “bruh you’re literally written by a man for men.”

But if Sweeney is depicted as a Greek goddess—flanked by Corinthian columns, attended by toga-draped nymphettes—she is also rendered, on the soap’s front, as a Christian saint. Her cartoonish likeness is centered in a circular frame that glows like a halo, an unmistakable though perhaps unintentional nod to the aesthetics of Eastern Orthodox and Catholic iconography. She is frontal, radiant, and stylized—not realistic, but symbolic. In this image, Sweeney becomes not just a celebrity, but an icon in the technical sense: a 2D image meant not to imitate life, but to stimulate veneration. But whether she appears as Aphrodite or Saint Sydney, the underlying message of the campaign is the same: Sweeney is not simply human. She is transcendent, untouchable, divine.

Someone once quipped that it must be exhausting to be God: the constant clamoring, the ceaseless prayers, the needy attention, the sycophantic fawning. This, more or less, has been Sydney Sweeney’s experience. She has been aggressively stalked by paparazzi at her own home, some even trying to broker deals with her family members for bikini photos. “My actual safety is at risk,” Sweeney said. And then there are the unhinged comments from the excited disciples of “Sydney’s Bathwater Bliss.” Even before the product was announced, prospective customers were already begging Dr. Squatch to sell her bathwater. They fantasized about drinking it, using it as eye drops, and watering their prized bonsai trees with it. These people are the faithful. They are the ones who buy the soap.

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What is a relic, exactly? According to Wikipedia, a relic “usually consists of the physical remains or personal effects of a saint or other person preserved for the purpose of veneration as a tangible memorial.” The word comes from the Latin reliquiae, and means “remains.” While we usually associate relic veneration with Roman Catholicism, relics are important in some forms of Buddhism and Islam.

In Medieval Europe, nearly every town or village had a relic that acted as a focal point for the community. As scholar and art dealer Andrew Butterfield writes in The New Republic: 

“Throughout much of history, at the heart of every village, town, and city in Europe, there lay a dead body. This was not the mystical body of Christ, symbolically consumed by his followers in the sacred rite of mass. It was a real body—a corpse; and whether intact, or only a fragment of bone, hair, or flesh, it was believed to be magical and alive. During feast days and other sacral events, this body had the power to draw the entire community together in a united and sanctified whole. Even more, it was only in the presence of this body, and through its miraculous agency, that one could supplicate God and be confident that he would listen. In times of crisis, in war, famine, plague, and drought, the promise of its protection was sought with the utmost fervor; sometimes this promise was all one had. It was the first, last, and best of hopes. For more than a thousand years in Europe, all the important deeds of life were carried out under saints’ blessings, assured by the proximity of their relics. One did not plant crops, launch a ship, start a building, convene a gathering, give birth to a baby, or bury a relative without seeking to have the remains of saints physically nearby. As the special dead, saints were believed to be spiritual and invisible, but their power to heal, to bless, and to defend worked—or worked best—if they were materially and bodily present as relics.”

Relics took many forms. They might be the bones and ashes of a martyr, or stranger objects like the Holy Prepuce (the circumcised foreskin of Jesus), or the breast milk of the Virgin Mary. But relics included more than just body parts. “Anything that Jesus, Mary, or the saints touched was thought to retain the glow of sanctity,” writes Butterfield. “So items of their clothing, and objects from the life of Christ—particularly pieces of the True Cross—were also venerated as holy. In some periods so much earth was taken from the places of Christ’s Passion in Jerusalem that new soil had to be brought in every night to refill the ground.”

This power was believed to be partly transferable: cloth, oil, or water that came into contact with sacred remains could be made into a new relic, capable of radiating the same spiritual force. In this way, the relic embodied real sacred presence, making the saint materially available and emotionally accessible to the devotee. As fifth-century monk John of Damascus explained, “Since I am human and clothed with a body, I desire to see and be present with the saints physically.”

(Worshipers venerating a relic of St. Jude. Photo credit: Bradley Zint/Diocese of Orange/National Catholic Reporter)

In the New Testament, we glimpse the logic of the relic: the Book of Acts reports that the sick were healed by touching handkerchiefs that the apostle Paul had touched (Acts 19:11–12). Aside from this example, however, scriptural precedent for relics is scarce. But theological imagination was never bound by scarcity—it filled in the gaps. John of Damascus turned to a story from the Torah to explain how relics work: “When Jacob received Joseph’s coat of many colors from his brothers who had sold him, he caressed it and wept as he gazed upon it. He was not weeping because of the coat, but it seemed to him by embracing the coat he was embracing Joseph, and held him in his arms. In the same way, when we Christians embrace the icons of Jesus or an apostle or a martyr with a physical kiss, we give a spiritual kiss to Christ himself or his martyr.” For Damascus, the relic acts as a bridge between absence and presence, letting believers touch what they cannot reach.

These reflections help explain why a pixelated likeness of Sweeney is not enough for her most devoted followers. They crave not just image but substance; not just representation, but residue. Like Jacob embracing Joseph’s bloodied cloak, the fans who lather up with “Bathwater Bliss” feel as though they are embracing Sweeney herself. By possessing the soap, they believe they “know” her, in both the everyday and biblical sense of the word. The relic offers immediacy, intimacy, and above all, material contact. It renders the distant near and the transcendent tangible. It makes the divine latherable.

***

Some might object and insist that to equate Dr. Squatch’s cynical, money-making scheme with ancient religious relics is to trivialize the holy. But relics have always been a profitable business for hucksters and opportunists. Consider Geoffrey Chaucer’s character the Pardoner, a shameless fraud who peddles bogus relics to the devout for a price. Among his wares was a glass container of pig bones, which he passed off as the bones of saints. The Pardoner knows exactly what relic-hungry pilgrims want, and he sells it to them with a grin. The marketers behind “Sydney’s Bathwater Bliss” are not so different: they’ve bottled a modern relic for a modern audience, appealing not to faith, but to fantasy.

It was the cynicism and greed embodied by Chaucer’s Pardoner that made the economy of relics a particular target of Protestant scorn. Of the proliferation of fake relics, John Calvin once remarked, “Had the Virgin been a wet-nurse her whole life, or a dairy, she could not have produced more [milk] than is shown as hers in various parts.” Calvin’s rationalist skepticism about the veracity of relics finds an echo today on r/Entertainment, a Reddit forum where users debate whether Sydney Sweeney’s bath water is actually “real,” and puzzle over the logistics of its distribution. “Legally you can’t actually sell sanitary products unless they are well…clean, so it’s just an ad hook,” one skeptic insists. “I’m just imagining her needing to like, siphon the bath water into buckets with lids after every bath to be picked up by some guy every other week and driven across state lines to a soap-making facility,” another writes. A third speculates: “It could also just be a medicine dropper full for an entire 1,000 gallon batch or something.” One final commenter broke out the calculator: “Since it’s limited to 5,000 bars it would only be one bath, assuming she’s using 2 oz of water per bar of soap. 302 liters per bathtub, ~34 oz per liter.”

The intensity of interest in whether Sweeney’s essence will “really” be included in the bar of soap, or whether the whole thing is “just” a gimmick, is telling. To me, the obsessive scrutiny of the soap’s logistics—its sourcing, siphoning, filtration, and distribution—betrays a deeper, naive faith: that if presence could be captured, if essence could survive the process, that it would matter greatly. In other words, the skeptical impulse to question whether the bathwater is “real” is, paradoxically, the clearest sign that many people wish it could be. Like the medieval pilgrim fingering a splinter of wood from Jesus’s crucifixion cross, they want to believe that some sacred essence, however diluted or diffuse, remains.

Others object that to call Sweeney’s soap a “relic” is to give undue importance and gravity to what is actually only a ‘memento’ or ‘souvenir.’ But that distinction is quite arbitrary, and breaks down under scrutiny. Consider this example from Butterfield’s essay:

“Nothing illustrates the change of attitude in the Protestant north more than the case of Frederick the Wise, the Elector of Saxony, who as the ruler of Wittenberg became an early protector of Martin Luther. In 1517, when Luther nailed up his Ninety-Five Theses, Frederick personally owned more than seventeen thousand relics. But by the middle of the sixteenth century his entire collection had been thrown out or melted down, except one piece, the so-called Hedwig Beaker, and this was preserved not because of its associations with a legendary saint but because Frederick’s grandson had given it to Luther. It was saved as a memento—not as a relic—of the great reformer.”

But despite what Butterfield claims, one might contend that the relic was not transformed from a ‘relic’ to a ‘memento,’ but was actually changed from a Catholic relic to a Protestant one. Its meaning didn’t vanish; it was redirected. The Hedwig Beaker still functioned as a vessel of holy presence, only now it carried the aura of Luther instead of Saint Hedwig. The Protestant may deny that the object functioned as a relic or an object of worship. But he nevertheless kept the object because he believed it contained a vague power by virtue of its one-time possession by the Monk of Wittenberg.

Similarly, those who purchase Sydney’s bathwater soap might balk at implications that they are engaging in religious activity. But their behavior betrays a similar logic: the soap is not just a novelty, but a token of contact, imbued with the aura of the adored. Like the Hedwig Beaker, its power lies in its proximity to the body of the venerated. The buyers may reject the language of relics, but they still act as if presence can be transmitted through matter, as if a sacred trace can linger in suds and lather. In that sense, the line between relic and memento becomes blurry and unstable. It may be, then, that the difference between a ‘momento’ and a ‘relic’ is one of degree, not kind. A relic might demand a different intensity of devotion, but both materialize a trace of presence, drawing the absent and transcendent near. For the many who plan to eat Sweeney’s bath soap like a communion wafer, the word ‘relic’ doesn’t seem farfetched at all. It remains to be seen whether a soap-eater will claim to have been magically healed of their impotence.

***

Many young men today feel deeply isolated from real women. For some, the dating landscape seems rigged: a vanishingly small number of “Chads” monopolize female attention, while ordinary men languish in obscurity. This perception isn’t baseless. An infamous OkCupid analysis found that women rated 80% of men as below-average in attractiveness. On Tinder, men swipe right on 46% of profiles; women swipe right on only 14%. Internal data shows that just 20% of users—mainly the most attractive men—receive 80% of all matches. On Reddit (r/shortguys), vertically-challenged men lament the bleakness of the dating market. One Redditor waxes pessimistic, telling his fellow short kings that “dating apps should not be used by average or below average men.” Another expresses frustration that even “warm approaching does nothing… 300+ approaches, all rejections.” A final commentator writes, “I don’t even bother approaching girls in public anymore…it’s pointless.” It’s not just the altitude-impaired; similar rhetoric is found in many male spaces. The upshot is that for many young men, women now seem unapproachable, unattainable, and untouchable. Mythical, even. Goddesses on faraway Olympus.

In this current malaise of loneliness, pornography is taking on a different character. In Beauty: A Very Short Introduction (2011), Roger Scruton defines pornography as “a magic wand that turns subjects into objects, people into things— and thereby disenchants them, destroying the source of their beauty. It causes people to hide behind their bodies, like puppets worked by hidden strings.” But much has changed since the book’s publication in 2011; today’s pornography is taking on a different character. With the rise of OnlyFans and soapy relics, many men want more than just body parts. They want connection, personality, maybe even subjectivity. For many, the anonymous, objectified porn of yesteryear no longer suffices. Instead, they pay a monthly subscription to specific adult entertainers so they can text with them. They buy “Sydney Sweeney’s Bathwater Bliss” to luxuriate in her tangible, if diffuse, presence. They don’t just want an anonymous nude, they want a holyrood—a relic bearing the trace of real touch.

Many cultural critics have argued that we have entered a new age in history: the age of disembodiment. In The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World (2024), Christine Rosen, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, decries an “epidemic of excarnation”—a collective, cultural flight from the real, fleshy world into a disembodied, technological one. Similarly, British journalist Mary Harrington, in Feminism Against Progress (2023), argues that the internet allows us to engage with the world as avatars—as usernames floating free of our bodies—and that we have become estranged from embodiment in deeply troubling ways. She calls for a “reactionary feminism” rooted in the realities and constraints of physical life.

The relic of Sydney Sweeney’s bathwater suggests that the revolution Rosen and Harrington describe is not yet complete. If it were—if we truly lived in an age of total excarnation—then Sweeney’s pixelated image should be enough for us. But it isn’t. The obsession with real contact—however mediated—suggests that the desire for the body has not vanished. There remains a hunger for the physical artifact, for the trace of presence, for something that has touched what we long to touch.

And yet, if we are trending toward an age of excarnation, then this may be what intimacy will look like in the future: capitalism will sell touch back to us at a price. As we drift deeper into disembodiment and interpersonal disconnection, presence will be bottled, branded, and sold as a commodity in an erotic relic economy. Chaucer’s Pardoner lives on, his wares updated for the 21st century.

Corey Wozniak lives with his wife and four sons in Las Vegas, NV. He teaches English and Comparative Religions at a public high school.