Hilary Fannin: The biggest enemy out there is . . . dehydration?

‘Summer alert!” screamed the headline on the abandoned magazine cover, spread out on the aircraft seat as we made our slow procession down the littered aisle towards the exit door. “Top ten musts for looking your absolute fabulous best this summer.” I read, upside down, while someone else’s puce-coloured toddler expressed her deepening frustration with the tedium of air travel just inches from my shell-likes.

“Stop!” screamed the standfirst. I did. I had no choice. The woman in front of me had many and various pieces of angular hand luggage that she was helpfully blocking up the aisle and repeatedly bruising my calves with. I wasn’t going anywhere.

“Not to prime is a crime!” cautioned the article, although from my angle it read “!emirc a si emirp ot toN”, which was vaguely more interesting and in possession of equal veracity.

Like me, you may have been labouring under the illusion that life’s perilous journey (and I don’t mean the one from Heathrow to Dublin) meant negotiating unwieldy old bugbears such as love and loss and grief and hope and, oh, you know . . . children and work and successes and failures, and indeed coming to terms with the inadequacy of our own tiny footprint on the fault lines of this unjust and ragged world.

Nope. No. Not so. I’m afraid you were wrong about that. You, my friend, were spectacularly mistaken. Life is about the successful seasonal adjustment of your beauty routines. Life, mate, is about staying matt and hydrated.

Wrong end of the mascara

I don’t know about you, but my fears tend to revolve around potentially vile and random things happening to the people I love, and vile and random things happening to the people I share the planet with; and climate change, of course, which regularly disturbs my sleep like a pyjama-damp child.

But it seems I’ve got the wrong end of the mascara wand, as apparently the biggest enemy out there is dehydration. Perfidious, perilous dehydration, which just plays havoc with your epidermis.

“What dehydration?” you ask. “It’s bleedin’ raining.”

Don’t be lulled into a false sense of security by precipitation; don’t be fooled by the swollen breeze, or by the occasional bite of frost on a silky June night, or by the rolling mist that obliterates the coastline.

Noxious dehydration, with its underhand way of making your hair limp and dull, your skin patchy and shiny and, it should be said, anything but luminous, is the one that’ll get you in the end.

Pickled by chlorine

And if humidity is not your undoing, if humidity doesn’t cut the carefully waxed legs from under you, then chlorine will. Chlorine! God between us and all harm. If it’s not bleaching the colour out of your bikini bottoms or sucking the marrow from your exfoliated bones, it’s drying out your skin like parchment, pickling you, making a gherkin out of your giblets.

Endlessly fascinating what you can learn, craning over a seat back, from a defeated, spent magazine that someone on their way to somewhere else has tired of and abandoned.

Unsurprisingly, there are all sorts of products out there on the shelves, clogging up the duty-free, to undo the ravaging effects of summer. Creams and unguents, vials of cuckoo spittle, half-price bottles of elf juice. In my locked-in position, hovering over seat 27C, however, with the aforementioned toddler now at full purple-cheeked, indignant throttle and the luggage owner searching for her passport among her bruising bags of bubble-wrapped gin and bunched-up underwear, I was in no position to turn the glossy pages, to let you know where to locate the remedies.

The day before, in a London flat, I had cleared out a recently deceased friend’s bathroom. I had consigned to the bin half-used lipstick, blunt eyeliner, nailbrush, battery-operated toothbrush, sticky varnish, lavender-scented hand cream, cotton-wool pads.

I had picked up a box of Band Aids, crumpled, faded; inside, the plasters were wrapped in yellowing sachets. This box had history, had travelled, probably in the bottom of her canvas bag on a Moroccan bus, or slung over her shoulder as she pushed her way through a morning market in a mountainous Spanish town where the watermelons shone dark green under the climbing sun.

I held the sun-stained box in my hand, half-heard its whisper fade away.

The flight door opened. Our stagnant procession shifted, and the toddler hit the pause button on her rage machine. We were released from our limbo. We disembarked. The pretty paper girl illustrating the summer beauty article quit her beseeching, closed her paper mouth.