I am minding or borrowing, depending on your point of view, a friend’s apartment in Scotland. I can work anywhere and the family responsibilities that shaped my time for so many years have dissipated with rapidity. One son is travelling and the other works elsewhere; I miss them, and also their adventures offer some new freedoms for me.
I needed to buy shampoo. For decades, we’ve just reached for the cheapest stuff in the biggest bottles; being blessed with the kind of teenagers who love to shower, we seemed to get through shampoo as fast as milk and peanut butter and similar fuel for adolescence. Every so often I’d buy something nicer for myself, but it went just as quickly and I’ve never been able to sustain an interest in lotions and potions anyway.
So for the first time in many years, I found myself choosing shampoo. I was mystified, amused and then frustrated: where is the one that just makes your hair clean?
First, it seemed, I needed to diagnose my hair, name its failings. Is it too “fine” (I think this must mean that it is thin, that more hair would be better)? Too “thick” (too much hair, maybe)? Do I hope to “tame” curls (why?) or add “volume”? (I didn’t get very far with physics but I’m reasonably sure that nothing in a shampoo bottle will increase the volume of a hair.) Is it “fragile” or “coarse”? (Are we mitigating a surfeit of feminine refinement or regrettable vulgarity?) Do I long for “gloss” or “shine”, apparently not the same effect?
READ MORE
Some offered protein and vitamins. I studied biology for longer than physics but didn’t reach the explanation of how we might absorb nutrients through our hair. I know from reading detective fiction that if you eat arsenic it will appear measurably in your hair, but I’m pretty sure that’s a one-way street.
Some promised to protect me, or at least my hair, from modernity, providing “barriers” through which air pollution, unspecified ”toxins" and the light of the sun itself could not pass. It is, of course, easier as well as more profitable to sell magic potions to ward off such assaults than to change the systems that create environmental toxins. It’s a shame that the manufacture, packaging and shipping of these products adds to the problems from which they promise shelter.
As I havered there, still hoping to find something claiming to offer no more than cleanliness and a nice smell, still refusing to name any particular deficit or ailment in my hair, I remembered one of the many lodgers who lived in my house when I was a child.
They were mostly international graduate students and researchers at the local university; my parents needed to fund the ongoing renovation of our Victorian house and thought it good for both sides to include strangers from far away in family life. (They were sometimes wrong, but it was always interesting.)
In the late 1980s, before the Iron Curtain fell, a Polish scientist lived in our spare room. In his first week, my father and I took Stephan to the supermarket, feeling simultaneous pride and embarrassment about the cornucopia on show. Stephan admired much of the food, but he paused in horror at the toothpaste aisle; who, he demanded, could possibly need so much, so many kinds? Surely, there was toothpaste. It cleaned your teeth, and everyone else’s teeth. The end.
[ Midlife has come with a liberating loss of self-consciousnessOpens in new window ]
I saw enough Communism in action to feel no hankering to live under such a regime, but I saw then and see now the point about the toothpaste, which is also the point about the shampoo.
We’re encouraged to confuse choice and freedom. Sometimes it’s true that there is no freedom without choice, especially in relation to bodily autonomy: a woman denied choices about whether and when to have children is denied freedom; a person denied choice about where to go and what work to do is not free.
But your choice from a menu of deficits for your hair, skin and body is not freedom. Your choice of which plastic bottles to add – I hope – to the recycling is not freedom. One form of freedom would be not the freedom to choose but the freedom from choice, the provision of something – shampoo, healthcare, education – that is good enough for everyone. And then we could all attend to more creative, urgent or interesting concerns.
