Food For Your Face

Sydney Morning Herald

Thursday March 22, 2007

Words Charles Purcell

Forget testing on animals. When cosmetics companies start putting fruit in their products, they've gone too far.

What's the story with adding "food" to grooming products? How come shampoo bottle labels now say things like "with added pawpaw" or "drizzled with pear nectar"? It's not as if we're about to say, "ah, that sounds delicious" and drink it afterwards, are we?

Is the addition of food in beauty products a covert way of feeding women already starving themselves to conform to Western ideals of beauty? By and large, the food-as-beauty-product thing is aimed at women. Men don't care if their shampoo has carbohydrates in it - just that it will transform us into ninjas or racing car drivers and that models will sleep with us.

We all know that our shampoos and soaps are concocted from ghastly chemical compounds made of ingredients with gigantic names such as phenoxyethanol. But adding kiwifruit to the mix is just part of the petrochemical industry's attempt to fool us that we're having an "organic" experience.

(It's a scandal akin to gelatine - it's made of horses' hooves, I tell you! Horses' hooves!)

You only have to look at the shampoos in the supermarket to see the nature myth at work. Their labels boast berries, apricots, citrus and wheatgerm. Sounds delicious. And "sea minerals"? What the hell are those? Crushed sea monkeys - with crushed little crowns included like you saw on the packets as a kid?

They'll be putting in guarana next, just to give you that caffeine-like kick when you come out of the shower all sleepy.

And how much "food" is going in, anyway? Are they dropping whole pineapple chunks into the giant industrial shampoo vats - or using an eyedropper to add just enough for "taste"? Presumably, the actual percentage would be something like those cans of lemonade that claim 5 per cent "real" lemons, the other 95 per cent being Industrial Chemist Compound No. 5056.

Still feeling peckish? Why not have some oat milk and honey with your hand soap? Why, you can just pour it right into your cereal. What's next? Soylent Green soap?

You wouldn't have a proper meal without flowers, either. No shower experience would be complete without dandelions, sunflowers or daisies trickling down your face. And don't forget the herbs. You can almost imagine a waiter with a giant pepper grinder coming around, saying, "Would sir like some ginseng with his dandruff shampoo?" If you must use a herb, why not use hops? A lot of beer-obsessed men would thank you. Or even marijuana? It's a herb, isn't it?

Facial cleansers are a prime culprit, too. What feasible reason does avocado have for being applied to your face, if only to make people laugh? It belongs in a BLAT (bacon, lettuce, avocado and tomato sandwich - delicious!). Strawberries should be served with champagne, not as part of a Frankenstein-esque scrub. And nuts? They belong in bowls at bars, lightly drizzled with the wee of a dozen men who forgot to wash their hands - not mixed with industrial paint thinners. At least good old witch-hazel never lies. Good for acne; terrible on salads.

Have we become so soft that we want to take out any hint of discomfort in our grooming? Ancient Roman women used lead as part of their make-up, even if it would eventually kill them. They knew beauty products were meant to be painful, not delicious. Why, one not-too-old recipe for a natural herbal conditioner called for one teaspoon of dried stinging nettle leaves.

And a good thing it was, too. Men are supposed to be in just-applied-aftershave-to-a-freshly-shaven-face agony when we perform our grooming, not screaming "YES! YES! YES!" like that woman in the shampoo commercial.