Miss Dior
For my birthday at the end of February, I was lucky enough to be given some beautiful Gucci perfume by my eldest daughter and her son. They apparently spent a long time smelling all the testers to make sure they got one that was me. And they obviously know me well because the perfume they chose is just right. Perfume is a funny thing. It is not essential, but some people can be recognized by the scent they habitually apply. The perfume I always used to wear is no longer available, but I still have a drop of it in bottle and I use it for special occasions with my husband because, although we have never discussed it, I am sure the smell of it transports him, like me, to a time when we were both young and living it up in London.
Perfume and cosmetics are big business. In 2023, LVMH, earned record profits selling products that nobody needs, and it is just one of the conglomerates getting ever richer selling things verboten by the not-buying-anything-that-isn’t-necessary category of my marginal living experiment. Not falling for these products is hard because we are constantly bombarded with advertising telling us that this skin cream or that lip plumper is going to be the thing that finally makes us look more attractive, feel better, and generally be happier.
And we may get a buzz for a minute after buying these products, but this feeling doesn’t last. It would be disastrous for the advertising industry if feelings of happiness and satisfaction caused by the consumption they encourage weren’t as fleeting as they are. In fact, research has shown that the “higher a country’s ad spend was in one year, the less satisfied its citizens were a year or two later. Their conclusion: Advertising makes us unhappy.” As advertisers are so good at what they do, I guess that means buying things doesn’t make us happy either. Duh. Guess what, in the US, advertising spending is significantly larger than any other country. And we definitely aren’t at the top of the happiness index.
Anyway, back to me and my fellow women. Many of these advertising dollars are in the service of making us feel inadequate. Instagram is overflowing with miracle creams that promise to get rid of the bags under our aging eyes and shampoos that suggest they will make our hair look like a team of professionals has spent hours working on it (which is why the models in the adverts have such great hair). These ads are tempting, especially when I see the ravages of age each time I accidentally catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror and more especially if the day has been particularly crap. A click of a button and the credit card details are auto-filled, leaving me anticipating the frisson of pleasure when the package arrives in the mail.
I can see through the advertisers’ crafty little game, of course, but that hasn’t stopped me clicking those buttons with shameful regularity. Not any more, though. I am proud to announce that almost a quarter of the way through the year, I haven’t bought as much as a chap stick from online sources or even from Trader Joes, whose creams and serums feel nice, even if they don’t actually achieve what they are supposed to. My visits to CVS haven’t ended with any new lipsticks or blushers in my make up drawer. Even the eco-friendly offerings at Whole Foods have left me unaffected.
None of this means I have been going without because, as you can probably guess, I have enough of just about everything to take me to my grave.
My mother was a model and a very early memory is sitting by her side and watching her reflection in a huge mahogany mirror as she “put her face on.” She wore the lot – foundation, cat’s eye liner, false eyelashes. She had beautiful skin to the day she died, and she put it down to three things. Childhood summers in St. Andrews, where it was so cold they had to wear coats on the beach, living for the first three-quarters of her life without central heating, and wearing foundation so thick the sun couldn’t penetrate it.
My mother wore a lot of makeup, but I am astonished by the blending and contouring that goes on now in preparation for even the most mundane of days. The pressure on young girls to buy into this Kardashian grotesquery is immense, certainly more than I have ever experienced, with D-list celebrities and influencers adding to the advertising onslaught. I am, however, delighted to have raised daughters who can rarely be bothered with makeup at all, and who are all the more beautiful for it. I do nag them about wearing sunscreen, though, because if you don’t wear foundation like my mother or the Kardashians, the sun can do its worst.
Coming of age in the seventies, I never wore foundation, cat’s eye liner, or false eyelashes. I even used to dye my eyelashes so that I didn’t have to bother with mascara. Perhaps it was the times, or perhaps I was rebelling against my mother for no particular reason, but for me less has always been more. When I was working, kind of, as an actress, I used to sit patiently getting my makeup plastered on, then I would go to the bathroom, remove it, and apply my own with a much lighter touch and no foundation. To be honest, though, my skin is already more lined than my mother’s was when she was two decades older than me, but that’s also because I didn’t holiday in Scotland as a kid, and corporations didn’t realize how much money they could make from sunscreens until quite a bit of damage had already been done.
These details may seem digressive, but all this is actually relevant to my marginal living experiment because I have collected a ton of makeup over the decades and I am pretty certain I could have stopped buying it years ago.
Above is the drawer I currently dig through in the mornings. There’s much more socked away in cupboards.
So not buying cosmetics and lotions is good, but getting rid of them?... I have read a couple of books about living with less. Apart from the one about Swedish Death Cleansing, they weren’t very good, certainly not good enough to recommend here, and the authors of the not good books both started their experiment by throwing things away. If they had two shampoos, they would throw away one, a drawer full of hotel soaps, out they went. To me, this seems suspiciously like a capitalist plot because instead of being able to use the perfectly good shampoo or soap that was consigned to the bin, anyone following the advice of these authors would eventually have to purchase new shampoos and soaps, probably from one of the aforementioned conglomerates.
For reasons I have already explained, this wasteful version of living with less is a non-starter for me. Of course, ideally, I will get rid of the things I can never imagine using, but that will have to wait until I become a more brutal declutterer. Meanwhile, not adding to my surplus is actually a fairly big achievement. The only things I can imagine having to restock during the next nine months are sunscreen because I might use it all up and perhaps nail varnish because it gets gummy with age.
The good by dates that the web is now trying to convince us apply to cosmetics are generally as nonsensical as those we have been convinced to follow for food. There’s even a handy best by calculator, supported by, well, just about every mega corporation that stands to benefit from our believing in it. Very occasionally I open a lipstick that is, and I am not kidding, over forty years old and the texture is a bit weird, but for the most part makeup lasts – I mean, think of all the forever chemicals in it! I actually still use a Lancôme mascara that was my mother’s. She died in 2005. It works fine, though it might be getting a little less bold. When I use it, I think of her, and because of that I could never throw it out.
I also have the remains of the last bottle of Miss Dior she owned. There’s just a tiny amount left, and I keep it in the dark, scared it might evaporate. This was her scent. Dior was scooped up by LVMH a few years ago and they almost immediately changed the ingredients in Miss Dior. The new version, even the one they now call Miss Dior Classic, is nothing like the old. It has lost the rich spiciness of the 1947 formulation and it definitely doesn’t transport me to my childhood like a smell from the bottle I have squirreled away does.
If my house caught fire, I would probably let the mascara go, but the bottle of perfume would be one of the things I would try to save. I don’t know if my daughters can remember how delicious their grandmother smelled. Maybe a whiff from my precious remaining drops of eau de toilette will bring the memory back. And perhaps one of them will volunteer to be the keeper of her scent when I am gone.