great millennial startup idea of the century

This was written on February 4, 2026. It feels important to note that it was neither published when it was written nor written close to the date it was published. Ok whatever moving on

So, I was just sitting here, minding my own business, battling some Resistance and journaling about not wanting to write, when this little idea for the Next Best Startup OF THE CENTURY plopped into my brain COMPLETELY UNINVITED and now I have to Deal With It. FUCK BEING A GENIUS IS SO ANNOYING. You have these... ideas and then you gotta just... sit on your hands and talk about them and then what? They don’t happen. They never happen. Do I tell you what the idea is? I don’t know if you’re worthy, to be honest. How do I know you’re not going to go see the next best venture capitalist on your block and tell them all about it and receive funding to build a factory and a warehouse and a Shopify theme and buy a branding storytelling agency and tell all your stupid friends and take away all the revenue that should have been MINE MINE MINE (the diamonds, shine bright etc).

Anyway ok look over the holidays I got into a kind of gift giving fever bc I had a little cash for a change and then one thing led to another and I was tripping over myself to get everyone the coolest gifts my money could currently buy BUT ALSO be Economic and Thrifty about it and not burn too much coal (you’d get it if you were German SORRY) on silly nonsense like... stuff explicitly made for gifting, you know? The stuff that is literally overpriced because the gift you’re giving is having bought something overpriced so the giftee will feel gooey and Worthy. Anyway NO FUCKING WAY I am falling for those bananas. So when my dad said “I liked the bath stuff you gave me for my birthday last year or was it christmas i don’t remember har har”¹ I devised an evil scheme to Never Run Out of bath salts to give him, Ever Again, And Also Have Enough To Gift Like 50 Other People Homemade Bath Salts Within The Next Year, Haaaaaahahahahahaha.

That is to say, I bought 20 kg Epsom salt for about 30 bucks, and another 5kg of Dead Sea salt for another 20, and some other stuff, spending about 130 total² and thus finding myself in need of a scheme to maximize what I’d now “invested.”

So I sat down and made a funny label to stick on the glass jars I wanted to fill with my bath salts, and 𝖓𝖎𝖒𝖒 𝖊𝖎𝖓 𝖇𝖆𝖉 was born. This was very fun, unnervingly so.

Anyway, long story shirt, I gifted a bunch of people these very elegant and pretty jars of Expensive³ Salts. Then, last week, my bb beauty boy wanted to take a bath, and I opened the jar containing my initial experiment to fill the bathtub with Christmas-scented salts, and what did greet me? The Smell of Mold. ABSOLUT MOLD. D’argh. Mouldymold.

Now, this is not the first time I have tried to make something cosmetic-y via a recipe I got from the internet or an LLM (shame? nah no shame. I had a whole discussion about it and did my research etc.) so it is definitely not the first time something has gone awry when I tried it for the first time. Come to think about it, MOST things go either spectacularly well when I try them for the first time (and the thing that goes wrong then rears its pretty head a few weeks later) or they go so wrong it is just hilarious.

So! Homemade bath salts, twas a fun thought, so lovely to package and thrust into people’s oh-so-naive hands, but a few weeks later, we have funky smelling shit in a jar that I now feel the need to apologize for.

LITTLE DO THE PEOPLE KNOW, though, that, by virtue of having stinky shit sitting around in a glass jar on their bathroom window sill, they are entirely responsible for this idea of a lifetime — nay, the century.

· · ·

Real talk though, this is pretty cool and not actually hard to execute. The only thing difficult about it is waiting till my Mac is no longer in writing-only mode so I can long for a domain, purchase some more lysolecithin and some little baggies and make a fucking prototype and then have Claude write me a business plan that I can present to my local unemployment agency who will then offer me a tiny grant which will cover the costs of maybe some more lysolecithin.

Okay FINE YOU HAVE WORN ME DOWN I will tell you about the idea but you must SWEAR not to tell your venture capitalist friends. (Wait what? Actually Idk whatever, tell whoever I don’t know what I’m saying or doing here anyway.)

So, the idea is to make DIY bath salts, ramen-style. Fill a paper cup with a Proprietary Mix of Epsom and Dead Sea salts (7:1 by weight). Add a packet of baking soda. Mix lecithin with almond oil, essential oils, and soap coloring, fill a small packet with that. Seal the cup with the salts and the packets, add a label with mixing instructions (1. Add baking soda to salts and mix! 2. Add Wet Ingredient packet. Stir Vigorously. Use Now. [Yes lecithin smells weird but it’ll pass once shit is in the water.] [No we don’t mean actual shit, just the shit you JUST NOW mixed, god, why are people so literal these days, literally.])

The cup will be all eco and brown and the label will be thermo-printed in all black and white clip art weimar-republic-core that doesn’t mean anything at all except that it demands of you in hearty blackletter to TAKE A BATH.

Revised April 17, 2026 · April 18, 2026.