May I suggest not washing your hair with eggs when you’ve got a hangover? Putting your hands into a jug of the stuff, stomach still gently reeling from a late night out, is like a cruel bushtucker trial. And I’m not even sure it will clean my hair.
This is what happens when Mark Constantine, the head of Lush cosmetics, is in your kitchen. A polite inquiry as to how hard it would be to make beauty products at home has resulted in a masterclass, in what can only be described as gunk, from Constantine and his colleague Helen Ambrosen, who has been working with him from the very earliest days when he was starting up the Body Shop with Anita Roddick.
The two of them zoom into my kitchen, giggly with excitement at the chance to plough through my cupboards and see what they can come up with. Within minutes there are heaps of porridge oats, desiccated coconut, dried beans, bananas, mushrooms, ground almonds, a pot of honey and a forlorn little pile of flower petals, ripped cruelly from the bouquet they brought with them.
“Right,” says Constantine. “Now, the first thing you have to do when making skin care products is not get into all those little boxes that the cosmetic industry wants you in — greasy, combination skin, all that. You have to think about exactly what you want to achieve. What do you want?”
“Erm ... something to clean my skin. And hair,” I reply. He stares at my hair. “Oily at the roots, dry at the ends, a lot of static, I bet, flyaway ...”
While Constantine lists the various items in my kitchen that can be coerced into working on my terrible hair, Ambrosen prepares a rice roulade for my skin. I have said that I only want to use items that you would naturally have to hand, but she asks if she can include three reasonably cheap ingredients which, in one form or another, are the basis of many of the products you buy in the shops (you can buy all of them at your chemist). She has brought glycerin (this is a humectant, which means it holds the moisture in the skin — it is impossible to moisturize your skin with water only), sweet almond oil (for recipes that need a vegetable oil, this is the most useful) and kaolin clay (clays are vital for tightening and helpful for cleansing). Using them in different proportions varies their effect.
There is one ingredient she has not bought, however, because “the great thing about making your own products is that you don’t have to use preservatives. All cosmetic companies must by law put preservatives into their products, but they’re horrible things.”
Constantine agrees: “Basically, they are there to kill any organisms that may get into your product, and for no other reason. What you have to understand about the modern cosmetic industry is that what the product will actually do is probably the last thing they’re interested in. When they’re putting a skin or a hair product together, they’re calculating how long it will last, how it will travel, the cheapest way to make it smell nice. It’s only after they’ve sorted all this out that they might have a little think about whether it will actually work.”
Ambrosen rubs the roulade on the back of her hand. “Try this. Is it scratchy enough? How scratchy do you want it?” A little scratchier, I say, and we look around for something else to add. A large spoonful of desiccated coconut gets chucked in, and then some of the oil of evening primrose capsules I have lying about.
“This is the best thing about my job, just messing around with things, coming up with something great at the end, or just having to ditch the whole day’s work,” says Constantine. The roulade is nearly ready and smells unexpectedly delicious. We spend a couple more enjoyable hours fiddling about (to my great joy, the burned bits of a banana cake I have made are included in the face mask — charcoal is good for your skin) and then they zoom off again.
Using these recipes and ingredients, some of which work, some of which don’t, is much messier and feels somehow more alive. The eggs, for example, leave my hair soft but with an unpleasant powdery texture that comes away on my hands when I touch it. I admit that I neglected to rinse afterwards with lemon juice, so this might be my fault. But for the next few washes — with normal shampoo — it comes up absolutely gorgeous, healthy and shining in the way it only does after I’ve been to the hairdresser.
My conclusion? Beauty products are like technology; sometimes the latest must-have is a sideways or even a backwards step, or just a bit of exploitative marketing. But sometimes they represent genuine progress. And so it is with beauty products. The cleansers you might buy in a high street chemist are pallid, synthetically perfumed, expensively packaged, and not a patch on the cleanser I made at home with some desiccated coconut in a quarter of an hour, and which I am using still. Oats in my bath: yes, please. However, when it comes to washing your hair in eggs, a little progress is perhaps not such a bad thing.
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