Detergent Gel and the Viscous: Beyond Barthes, Toward a Material Semiotics

Giacomo Festi

This paper proposes a semiotic inquiry into detergent gel as a material and medial object, taking its specific viscosity as the starting point for a broader reflection on how contemporary product communication encodes and mobilizes material qualities. The project concentrates on gel detergents for dishwashers and laundry – such as Finish Gel, Fairy Platinum Plus Gel, Persil Power Gel, Tide Liquid Gel, and Seventh Generation Free & Clear Gel – examining both their industrial materiality and their promotional mediatization. These products foreground viscosity in its polisensual aspect, combining visuality (slow-flowing “thick gel” imagery), touch (resistance, stickiness, density), and agency (dose control, adherence to stains).

The research brings together product communication and the semiotics of materials, moving beyond the classical treatment of detergents in Roland Barthes’s Mythologies. Whereas Barthes analysed detergents as mythic objects whose “deep action” was primarily symbolic and moral (purity, penetration, transformation), this study shifts attention to the incorporated, sensory, and practice-based dimensions of the viscous. Rather than reading the product only as a sign in discourse, we consider how its material behaviour and media representation co-produce meaning.

The main message is that studying materials as media allows us to move “beyond Barthes”: not just reading products as myths, but understanding how material behaviours themselves communicate. Viscosity, in this sense, emerges as a powerful operator for rethinking the semiotics of everyday objects.