So, aside from, perhaps, the color red, what’s Burmese about Burma-Shave? Did I hear you ask? Well, as Leonard Odell tells it in Frank Rowsome’s book The Verse by the Side of the Road, Burma-Shave was preceded as a family enterprise by a liniment or topical health aid developed by his grandfather and named by his father:
    “We called it Burma-Vita. Burma because most of the essential oils in the liniment came from the Malay peninsula and Burma, and Vita from the Latin for life and vigor—the whole name meaning Life from Burma.”
    It is unclear whether any of these particular essential oils made it into the shaving cream knows as Burma-Shave, the result of over 300 chemical experiments, but as a prefix for a product name, Burma- was alive!