New York Times, Wednesday, May 12, 2021

My mundane morning shower routine sparked the inspiration for this puzzle when the brand name of a certain shampoo caught my eye and lit up my constructor brain. Although initialisms are a basic theme type, I was pleased to see that these particular letters had never been used before and the revealer was a "fun, different take on this type of theme genre" according to Joel Fagliano.

Five theme entries and a revealer — plus being careful not to include any extraneous "VO" combinations anywhere in the puzzle — constrained my grid of any bonus long down entries, but I was happy to be able to debut some new entries to the XWord Info database.

Hope you enjoy the solve!

I can Name That Theme in two entries! VITAL ORGAN, VIDALIA ONION, then I jumped to the middle row, confidently dropping in a starting V. No VEERing OFF for me! Down to the bottom right corner, a perfect place to drop in a dollop of Alberto VO5. 54-Down, [Colorful flower with "a face"] ... with such a kooky clue, it had to be thematic. PANS5. Done!

Cue sad trombone.

Initialism puzzles are so plentiful that these days, they need something extra. VO5 certainly is an apt revealer for five V O phrases. Impressive job working in the 5 — PAR 5 is seen on golf courses all the time, whereas something like HIGH 5 would have been odd, in the same way V-EIGHT is.

Closing off that bottom left corner sure makes it easier to grid around the VO5 / PAR5 crossing. It chokes off that region, though. I bet there are reasonable grid fills if Tracy took out the black square between EPA and OPS.

I hadn't heard of VIN ORDINAIRE, but that's no surprise considering I can barely tell the difference between red wine and red blood. Neat term to learn.

(If there were only something a few steps lower, like VIN ATROCE. I'd pay two dollars for that.)

Initialism puzzles can stand out if the initials are difficult to work with. V does have that quality to a certain extent, but some searching turned up VEGETABLE OIL, VISUAL OPTICS, VEAL OSCAR, VOLUNTARY OATH, VIRTUAL OFFICE.

Some sparks of fun in the cluing, wordplay like [Took a dip?] pointing to SAGGED — a literal dip. Riffing on a "pocketful of rye" for LOAF amused me, too.

I paused at the crossing of VIDALIA and ET ALII, since ET ALIA is also a valid entry, as is ET ALIAE. I'd be sympathetic to those who thought VIDALIA or VIDALAA looked correct.

It'd have been great to get more time separating this one from our last number-in-grid puzzle and something more to elevate it from the initialisms pack. Some excellent theme phrase choices, though.