This will surprise you: I’m not really into cosmetics. I know, its a shock. People look at me and assume that I must have skin regime that takes hours a day, that I spend endless time preening and primping and probably using Botox and fillers and all manner of heinous shit. But I don’t. This face represents the finest of natural beauty to the extent that people say I don’t look a day over 87. I use 3 ‘products’. Shower gel, face moisturiser so my forehead doesn’t itch (Marks and Spencer actually make the very best one), and talcum powder.

When people ask me ‘what was the worst thing about the first (proper) lockdown, there is only one answer. Cleaning the bathroom. That was my ‘duty’ as we divided the home care and labour. In fact we have two bathrooms, but don’t let that affect my membership of the Champagne Socialists (aka: the Hampstead Hypocrites). One was easy to clean. With my sprays and scrubbers and stuff. The other, “My” bathroom, was, in essence, a fucking nightmare. Because that’s the one in which I deploy the talcum powder.

I don’t just use it. I don’t just ‘rub a bit on’, I fucking drown in the stuff. I hurl it around and run through the clouds, in gay abandon (if you even think it, I’LL CANCEL YOU!!!), sling it on, under, between and into every nook and cranny this perfect body has. Because using a towel is boring. And talcum powder smells lovely and feels wonderful. If Mel is dressed in black she has to go and stand in the garden when I get out of the shower and give it an hour to settle.

Thus ‘cleaning the bathroom’ is, in essence, reclaiming talc from every horizontal surface in the room. Heaps of it. Piles. It’s like fourteen heavy rockers have been partying in there all night. White powder everywhere. I load it into sacks and recycle… ok, it gets dusted, swept, vacuumed, whatevered. 

And today I learn that Johnson & Johnson have been sued for $2billion because my absolute favourite of their products can give me ovarian cancer. Yup, according to the litigants in the state of Missouri, it is filled with Asbestos. And probably (for the purposes of my pending law-suit), ricin, botchelism, powdered uranium and covid dust. I mean, really? Asbestos? Like they couldn’t find anything better to put in? 

Powdery Wednesday

A xxxx