irony water

While buying some groceries in our shiny new Sainsbury's this evening I came across this product on the shelves with the washing powder and other cleaning products. I did a quick double-take as it looked just like a bottle of ordinary water - my initial assumption was that it was actually some sort of super-enviro-friendly Ecover-esque washing-up liquid made out of grasshopper spit and hemp or something.

But, on closer inspection, it turns out it's actually something called "ironing water", which is, as far as I can tell, water. Well, with just a dash of some nice fruity scent in it, to make all your freshly-ironed shirts smell of pomegranate. Which is pretty much exactly what I want my freshly-ironed shirts to smell of, let me tell you. Best of all, along with the pretty no-brainer usage instructions (basically "Pour into iron. Iron stuff") is this gem: "Do not dilute". WTF? It's fucking water! Is it homeopathic or something? Maybe dilution willl make it MORE POMEGRANATEY THAN YOU CAN POSSIBLY IMAGINE.

Sheesh. What a crock. But that hasn't stopped everyone else jumping on the bandwagon as well, Asda and Tesco included. To be fair to Tesco, they appear to be the only supermarket to mention what presumably is the point of the whole thing, such as it is, which is that it's distilled water with no dissolved mineral salts in it, and therefore it won't get the inside of your iron all limescale-y (though there might be a certain amount of pomegranate build-up). Even then they botch the science a bit by saying "contains no limescale" which isn't quite right - normal water contains no limescale, otherwise it'd be all lumpy. It's a bit like advertising Mars bars by saying "contains no plaque" - technically true, but not very helpful.